Facebook (and Systems Biologists) Take Note: Network Analysis Reveals True Connections : Northwestern University Newscenter

Description

EVANSTON, Ill. --- Facebook figures out that you know Holly, although you haven't seen her in 10 years, because you have four mutual friends -- a good predictor of direct friendship. But sometimes Facebook gets it wrong. "Hey, I don't know Harry!"

Roger Guimera and Marta Sales-Pardo , a husband-wife research team at Northwestern University, have developed a universal method that can accurately analyze a range of complex networks -- including social networks, protein-protein interactions and air transportation networks. Although the datasets they used were much smaller than Facebook's, the researchers demonstrated the great potential of their method.

Guimera and Sales-Pardo had wondered if one technique, exploiting the fact that all networks have groups in them and those groups are connected in many different ways, could be used to predict both friendships in a social network and protein-protein interactions within a cell. They applied their mathematical and computational framework to five different networks, ranging from a group of dolphins to a network of neurons, and found one method indeed could reliably analyze all.

The details of their algorithm, which can predict missing and spurious interactions in a system, will be published in the Dec. 7 Early Edition by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

"The way the flu spreads, for example, is ...

Original URL

http://www.northwestern.edu/newscenter/stories/2009/12/networks.html

http://www.northwestern.edu/newscenter/stories/2009/12/networks.html