Biomedical subjects

Massimo Marchiori

Publications and source records attributed to Massimo Marchiori.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2005

Vulnerability and protection of infrastructure networks.

Infrastructure systems are a key ingredient of modern society. We discuss a general method to find the critical components of an infrastructure network, i.e., the nodes and the links fundamental to the perfect functioning of the network. Such nodes, and not the most connected ones, are the targets to protect from terrorist attacks. The method, used as an improvement analysis, can also help to better shape a planned expansion of the network.

Journal Article↗

PubMed2004

Method to find community structures based on information centrality.

Community structures are an important feature of many social, biological, and technological networks. Here we study a variation on the method for detecting such communities proposed by Girvan and Newman and based on the idea of using centrality measures to define the community boundaries [M. Girvan and M. E. J. Newman, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 99, 7821 (2002)]. We develop an algorithm of hierarchical clustering that consists in finding and removing iteratively the edge with the highest information centrality. We test the algorithm on computer generated and real-world networks whose community structure is already known or has been studied by means of other methods. We show that our algorithm, although it runs to completion in a time O(n4) , is very effective especially when the communities are very mixed and hardly detectable by the other methods.

Algorithms↗

PubMed2004

Model for cascading failures in complex networks.

Large but rare cascades triggered by small initial shocks are present in most of the infrastructure networks. Here we present a simple model for cascading failures based on the dynamical redistribution of the flow on the network. We show that the breakdown of a single node is sufficient to collapse the efficiency of the entire system if the node is among the ones with largest load. This is particularly important for real-world networks with a highly hetereogeneous distribution of loads as the Internet and electrical power grids.

Journal Article↗