Markov chain-based numerical method for degree distributions of growing networks

Dinghua Shi, Qinghua Chen, Liming Liu
2005 Physical Review E  
In this paper, we establish a relation between growing networks and Markov chains, and propose a computational approach for network degree distributions. Using the Barabási-Albert model as an example, we first show that the degree evolution of a node in a growing network follows a nonhomogeneous Markov chain. Exploring the special structure of these Markov chains, we develop an efficient algorithm to compute the degree distribution numerically with a computation complexity of O͑t 2 ͒, where t
more » ... the number of time steps. We use three examples to demonstrate the computation procedure and compare the results with those from existing methods.
doi:10.1103/physreve.71.036140 pmid:15903526 fatcat:hlrlm3fl6bdjnblhmla5sp4b4a