Search NASA⌕ Search

SEARCH · Search NASA

Results for “network analysis”

Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.

Quote a phrase for an exact phrase match. Source license links do not imply unrestricted reuse.

At least 19 records

Spatiotemporal Characteristics and Propagation of Summer Extreme Precipitation Events over United States: A Complex Network Analysis

Complex Network (CN) is a graph-theory based depiction of relation shared by various elements of a complex-dynamical system such as the atmosphere. Here we applied the concept of CN to understand the directionality and topological structure of summer extreme precipitation events (SEPEs) over the conterminous United States (CONUS). The SEPEs are calculated based on the 95th percentile daily rainfall at 0.5ox0.5o spatial resolution for CONUS to investigate the multi-dimensional characteristics of precipitation extremes. The derived CN coefficients (e.g., betweenness centrality, clustering coefficient, orientation, and network divergence) reveal important structural and dynamical information about the topology of the SEPEs and improve understanding of the dominant meteorological patterns. The initiation and propagation of SEPEs from the source-zones to the sink-zones are identified. The SEPEs are influenced by topography, dominant wind patterns, and moisture sources in terms of their topological structure and spatial dynamics.

Mondal, Somnath↗

A local structure model for network analysis

The statistical analysis of networks is a popular research topic with ever widening applications. Exponential random graph models (ERGMs), which specify a model through interpretable, global network features, are common for this purpose. In this study we introduce a new class of models for network analysis, called local structure graph models (LSGMs). In contrast to an ERGM, a LSGM specifies a network model through local features and allows for an interpretable and controllable local dependence structure. In particular, LSGMs are formulated by a set of full conditional distributions for each network edge, e.g., the probability of edge presence/absence, depending on neighborhoods of other edges. Additional model features are introduced to aid in specification and to help alleviate a common issue (occurring also with ERGMs) of model degeneracy. Finally, the proposed models are demonstrated on a network of tornadoes in Arkansas where a LSGM is shown to perform significantly better than a model without local dependence.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Social Network Analysis in R: A Software Review

In education research, social network analysis is being widely used to study different interactions and their overall implications. Recently, there has also been a surge in the development of software tools to implement social network analysis. In this article, we review two popular R packages, igraph and statnet suite, in the context of network summarization and modeling. We discuss different aspects of these packages and demonstrate some of their functionalities by analyzing a friendship network of lawyers. Finally, we end with recommendations for using these packages along with pointers to additional resources for network analysis in R.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

How deep to dig: effects of web-scraping search depth on hyperlink network analysis of environmental stewardship organizations

Abstract Social network analysis (SNA) tools and concepts are essential for addressing many environmental management and sustainability issues. One method to gather SNA data is to scrape them from environmental organizations’ websites. Web-based research can provide important opportunities to understand environmental governance and policy networks while potentially reducing costs and time when compared to traditional survey and interview methods. A key parameter is ‘search depth,’ i.e., how many connected pages within a website to search for information. Existing research uses a variety of depths and no best practices exist, undermining research quality and case study comparability. We therefore analyze how search depth affects SNA data collection among environmental organizations, if results vary when organizations have different objectives, and how search depth affects social network structure. We find that scraping to a depth of three captures the majority of relevant network data regardless of an organization’s focus. Stakeholder identification (i.e., who is in the network) may require less scraping, but this might under-represent network structure (i.e., who is connected). We also discuss how scraping web-pages of local programs of larger organizations may lead to uncertain results and how our work can combine with mixed methods approaches.

Sayles, Jesse S. (ORCID:0000000218378920)↗

Global Network Analysis of Neisseria gonorrhoeae Identifies Coordination between Pathways, Processes, and Regulators Expressed during Human Infection

Neisseria gonorrhoeae is a Gram-negative diplococcus that is responsible for the sexually transmitted infection gonorrhea, a high-morbidity disease in the United States and worldwide. Over the past several years, N. gonorrhoeae strains resistant to antibiotics used to treat this infection have begun to emerge across the globe. Thus, new treatment strategies are needed to combat this organism. Here, we utilized N. gonorrhoeae transcriptomic data sets, including those obtained from natural infection of the human genital tract, to infer the first global gene coexpression network of this pathogen. Interrogation of this network revealed genes central to the network that are likely critical for gonococcal growth, metabolism, and virulence, including genes encoding hypothetical proteins expressed during mucosal infection. In addition, network analysis revealed overlap in the response of N. gonorrhoeae to incubation with neutrophils and exposure to hydrogen peroxide stress in vitro. Network analysis also identified new targets of the gonococcal global regulatory protein Fur, while examination of the network neighborhood of genes allowed us to assign additional putative categories to several proteins. Collectively, the characterization of the first gene coexpression network for N. gonorrhoeae described here has revealed new regulatory pathways and new categories for proteins and has shown how processes important to gonococcal infection in both men and women are linked. This information fills a critical gap in our understanding of virulence strategies of this obligate human pathogen and will aid in the development of new treatment strategies for gonorrhea.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗

RWRtoolkit: multi-omic network analysis using random walks on multiplex networks in any species

Abstract We introduce RWRtoolkit, a multiplex generation, exploration, and statistical package built for R and command-line users. RWRtoolkit enables the efficient exploration of large and highly complex biological networks generated from custom experimental data and/or from publicly available datasets, and is species agnostic. A range of functions can be used to find topological distances between biological entities, determine relationships within sets of interest, search for topological context around sets of interest, and statistically evaluate the strength of relationships within and between sets. The command-line interface is designed for parallelization on high-performance cluster systems, which enables high-throughput analysis such as permutation testing. Several tools in the package have also been made available for use in reproducible workflows via the KBase web application.

Kainer, David (ORCID:0000000172714676)↗

Assessing the Application of a Genomic Network Analysis in Population Ecology: Inferring Patterns of Dispersal and Geographic Structure in the Emerging Pathogen, Coccidioides

A challenge in population ecology studies is identifying how to best group individuals into populations, especially when individual origin is unknown. Machine learning has improved upon traditional methods of identifying population structure and is more efficient at handling large, complex datasets. We demonstrate the applicability of a machine learning method to identify hierarchical population structure in an emerging pathogen, Coccidioides spp., the causative agent of Valley fever. We compared the network clusters to structure identified by traditional tools as a validation of the network performance. We used publicly available whole-genome data for 48 C. immitis and 102 C. posadasii, resulting in 168,211 genome-wide SNPs among the two species. The network analysis grouped samples into populations comparable to the literature for these species but also identified fine-scale geographic structure and travel-associated cases not reported thus far. Exploring different resolutions in the network made it easy to identify unique genotypes specific to California and possibly Nevada, as well as Phoenix- and Tucson-acquired infections in non-endemic areas, regardless of reported travel history. The present study provides a promising example of how a ML-based network analysis can improve our ability to understand pathogen ecology, group cases into populations and infer travel-associated infections.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗

Data and programs in support of network analysis of genes and their association with diseases

The network-based approaches that were employed in order to depict the relationships between human genetic diseases and their associated genes are described. Towards this direction, monopartite disease-disease and gene-gene networks were constructed from bipartite gene-disease association networks. The latter were created by collecting and integrating data from three diverse resources, each one with different content, covering from rare monogenic disorders to common complex diseases. Moreover, topological and clustering graph analyses were performed. The methodology and the programs presented in this article are related to the research article entitled “Network analysis of genes and their association with diseases”.

Disease-disease networks↗

Network Analysis of Academic Medical Center Websites in the United States

Healthcare resources are published annually in repositories such as the AHA Annual Survey Database TM . However, these data repositories are created via manual surveying techniques which are cumbersome in collection and not updated as frequently as website information of the respective hospital systems represented. Also, this resource is not widely available to patients in an easy-to-use format. Network analysis techniques have the potential to create topological maps which serve to aid in pathfinding for patients in their search for healthcare services. This study explores the topological structure of forty United States academic health center websites. Network analysis is utilized to analyze and visualize 48,686 webpages. Several elements of network structure are examined including basic network properties, and centrality measures distributions. The Louvain community detection algorithm is used to examine the extent to which these techniques allow identification of healthcare resources within networks. The results indicate that websites with related healthcare services tend to form observable clusters useful in mapping key resources within a hospital system.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Complex Network Analysis and Intelligent Monitoring Platform

Data Products has particular interest in developing an efficient network analysis and monitoring system that utilizes advanced machine learning methods to mine complex network data of the type generated within large data centers, with an objective to provide tangible business-usable intelligence. The Laboratory is currently the lead institution for a U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science (DOE/SC) network research project called BigData Express (BDE). The project seeks to provide an orchestration service for high-performance data movement of data sets for large-scale science. This collaboration is believed to potentially be a highly symbiotic one, with Data Products platform development benefiting from the rich sets of network data available in the BDE development environment, and BDE benefiting from the Data Products machine learning analysis of BDE-generated data movement.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

COHERENT NETWORK ANALYSIS FOR CONTINUOUS GRAVITATIONAL WAVE SIGNALS IN A PULSAR TIMING ARRAY: PULSAR PHASES AS EXTRINSIC PARAMETERS

Supermassive black hole binaries are one of the primary targets of gravitational wave (GW) searches using pulsar timing arrays (PTAs). GW signals from such systems are well represented by parameterized models, allowing the standard Generalized Likelihood Ratio Test (GLRT) to be used for their detection and estimation. However, there is a dichotomy in how the GLRT can be implemented for PTAs: there are two possible ways in which one can split the set of signal parameters for semi-analytical and numerical extremization. The straightforward extension of the method used for continuous signals in ground-based GW searches, where the so-called pulsar phase parameters are maximized numerically, was addressed in an earlier paper. In this paper, we report the first study of the performance of the second approach where the pulsar phases are maximized semi-analytically. This approach is scalable since the number of parameters left over for numerical optimization does not depend on the size of the PTA. Our results show that for the same array size (9 pulsars), the new method performs somewhat worse in parameter estimation, but not in detection, than the previous method where the pulsar phases were maximized numerically. The origin of the performance discrepancy is likely to be in the ill-posedness that is intrinsic to any network analysis method. However, the scalability of the new method allows the ill-posedness to be mitigated by simply adding more pulsars to the array. This is shown explicitly by taking a larger array of pulsars.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗

Empirical Comparison of Visualization Tools for Larger-Scale Network Analysis

Gene expression, signal transduction, protein/chemical interactions, biomedical literature cooccurrences, and other concepts are often captured in biological network representations where nodes represent a certain bioentity and edges the connections between them. While many tools to manipulate, visualize, and interactively explore such networks already exist, only few of them can scale up and follow today’s indisputable information growth. In this review, we shortly list a catalog of available network visualization tools and, from a user-experience point of view, we identify four candidate tools suitable for larger-scale network analysis, visualization, and exploration. Lastly, we comment on their strengths and their weaknesses and empirically discuss their scalability, user friendliness, and postvisualization capabilities.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗

Understanding the Seismic Ground Motion Spatial Variability Using Network Analysis Community Detection

This project is to explore ground motion spatial distribution using a new approach graph-based network analysis. In this study, we combine a large-N seismic array and graph analytics to explore spatial variability and correlation at a local scale using small local and regional earthquakes. In this method, each seismic station is modeled as a node and the similarities of the waveforms that represent ground motions between two stations are modeled as edges. By analyzing this graph network using the similarity matrices and community detection algorithm, we can group the stations spatially with similar patterns. A random forest algorithm is used to reveal the important features that affect the spatial grouping. The result suggests site conditions, and how they interact with the incident seismic wavefield, strongly condition the spatial correlation of ground motion. Future progress in characterizing ground motion spatial variability will require dense wavefield measurements, either through nodal deployments, or perhaps distributed acoustic sensing measurements of seismic wavefields.

58 GEOSCIENCES↗

Spatially explicit network analysis reveals multi‐species annual cycle movement patterns of sea ducks

Abstract Conservation of long‐distance migratory species poses unique challenges. Migratory connectivity, that is, the extent to which groupings of individuals at breeding sites are maintained in wintering areas, is frequently used to evaluate population structure and assess use of key habitat areas. However, for species with complex or variable annual cycle movements, this traditional bimodal framework of migratory connectivity may be overly simplistic. Like many other waterfowl, sea ducks often travel to specific pre‐ and post‐breeding sites outside their nesting and wintering areas to prepare for migration by feeding extensively and, in some cases, molting their flight feathers. These additional migrations may play a key role in population structure, but are not included in traditional models of migratory connectivity. Network analysis, which applies graph theory to assess linkages between discrete locations or entities, offers a powerful tool for quantitatively assessing the contributions of different sites used throughout the annual cycle to complex spatial networks. We collected satellite telemetry data on annual cycle movements of 672 individual sea ducks of five species from throughout eastern North America and the Great Lakes. From these data, we constructed a multi‐species network model of migratory patterns and site use over the course of breeding, molting, wintering, and migratory staging. Our results highlight inter‐ and intra‐specific differences in the patterns and complexity of annual cycle movement patterns, including the central importance of staging and molting sites in James Bay, the St. Lawrence River, and southern New England to multi‐species annual cycle habitat linkages, and highlight the value of Long‐tailed Ducks ( Calengula haemalis ) as an umbrella species to represent the movement patterns of multiple sea duck species. We also discuss potential applications of network migration models to conservation prioritization, identification of population units, and integrating different data streams.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

Network analysis of memristive device circuits: dynamics, stability and correlations

Abstract Networks with memristive devices are a potential basis for the next generation of computing devices. They are also an important model system for basic science, from modeling nanoscale conductivity to providing insight into the information-processing of neurons. The resistance in a memristive device depends on the history of the applied bias and thus displays a type of memory. The interplay of this memory with the dynamic properties of the network can give rise to new behavior, offering many fascinating theoretical challenges. But methods to analyze general memristive circuits are not well described in the literature. In this paper we develop a general circuit analysis for networks that combine memristive devices alongside resistors, capacitors and inductors and under various types of control. We derive equations of motion for the memory parameters of these circuits and describe the conditions for which a network should display properties characteristic of a resonator system. For the case of a purely memresistive network, we derive Lyapunov functions, which can be used to study the stability of the network dynamics. Surprisingly, analysis of the Lyapunov functions show that these circuits do not always have a stable equilibrium in the case of nonlinear resistance and window functions. The Lyapunov function allows us to study circuit invariances, wherein different circuits give rise to similar equations of motion, which manifest through a gauge freedom and node permutations. Finally, we identify the relation between the graph Laplacian and the operators governing the dynamics of memristor networks operators, and we use these tools to study the correlations between distant memristive devices through the effective resistance.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Incorporating machine learning with building network analysis to predict multi-building energy use

Predicting multi-building energy use at campus or city district scale has recently gained more attention; and more researchers have started to define reference buildings and study inter-impact between building groups. However, how to integrate the relationship to define reference buildings and predict multi-building energy use, using significantly less amount of building data and reducing complexity of prediction models, remains an open research question. To resolve this, this study proposed a novel method to predict multi-building energy use by integrating a social network analysis (SNA) with an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) technique. The SNA method was used to establish a building network (BN) by identifying reference buildings and determine correlations between reference buildings and non-reference buildings. The ANN technique was applied to learn correlations and historical building energy use, and then used to predict multi-building energy use. To validate the SNA-ANN method, 17 buildings in the Southeast University campus, located in Nanjing, China, were studied. These buildings have three years of actual monthly electricity use data and were grouped into four types: office, educational, laboratory, and residential. The results showed the integrated SNA-ANN method achieved average prediction accuracies of 90.67% for the office group, 90.79% for the educational group, 92.34% for the laboratory group, and 83.32% for the residential group. The results demonstrated the proposed SNA-ANN method achieved an accuracy of 90.28% for the predicted energy use for all building groups. Finally, this study provides insights into advancing the interdisciplinary research on multi-building energy use prediction.

29 ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY↗