Social Network Resilience Analysis
Network Science
Graph Theory
Social Networks
Targeted Attacks
Problem to Solve
In a dystopian society, the Thought Police aim to fragment society by isolating influential individuals who deviate from the 'Single Thought.' This project addresses the need to identify whether protecting highly connected members or those with tightly-knit circles of acquaintances is more beneficial for maintaining network integrity.
- The Thought Police focus on isolating individuals with many connections and those whose friends are also interconnected.
- There is a need to determine the most effective strategy to protect the network's integrity against targeted attacks.
- Understanding the resilience of different network structures under attack is crucial for strategic planning.
- Lack of tools to simulate and visualize the impact of targeted attacks on network connectivity.
Proposed Solution
A strategic analysis tool that simulates targeted attacks on social networks and evaluates the resilience by analyzing the size of the giant component as a function of the number of nodes removed.
- Developed a modular pipeline using NetworkX and Matplotlib to generate and analyze scale-free and random networks.
- Created functions to simulate attacks on nodes with the highest degree and highest clustering coefficient.
- Implemented methods to eliminate targeted nodes and measure the impact on network connectivity.
- Designed an interactive visualization dashboard to explore the results of the attacks and assess network resilience.
- Provided a comparative analysis of the resilience of scale-free and random networks under different attack strategies.
Results
The tool demonstrated that protecting nodes with a higher clustering coefficient can be more advantageous, as these nodes show greater resistance to targeted attacks.
- Scale-free networks exhibited different resilience patterns compared to random networks under targeted attacks.
- Nodes with higher clustering coefficients were found to maintain network connectivity more effectively.
- The interactive dashboard provided clear visual insights into the impact of different attack strategies on network integrity.
- The findings offer valuable insights for strategic planning to protect network resilience against targeted attacks.
