PAFit: A Statistical Method for Measuring Preferential Attachment in Temporal Complex Networks.

ABSTRACT: Preferential attachment is a stochastic process that has been proposed to explain certain topological features characteristic of complex networks from diverse domains. The systematic investigation of preferential attachment is an important area of research in network science, not only for the theoretical matter of verifying whether this hypothesized process is operative in real-world networks, but also for the practical insights that follow from knowledge of its functional form. Here we describe a maximum likelihood based estimation method for the measurement of preferential attachment in temporal complex networks. We call the method PAFit, and implement it in an R package of the same name. PAFit constitutes an advance over previous methods primarily because we based it on a nonparametric

SUBMITTER: Pham T 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4574777 | biostudies-literature | 2015

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature