A Convolutional Neural Network Approach to Predicting Network Connectedness Robustness

To quantitatively measure the connectedness robustness of a complex network, a sequence of values that record the remaining connectedness of the network after a sequence of node- or edge-removal attacks can be used. However, it is computationally time-consuming to measure the network connectedness robustness by attack simulations for large-scale networked systems. In the present paper, an efficient method based on convolutional neural network (CNN) is proposed to train for estimating the network connectedness robustness. The new approach is motivated by the facts that 1) the adjacency matrix of a network can be converted to a gray-scale image and CNN is very powerful for image processing, and 2) CNN has proved very effective in predicting the controllability robustness of complex networks. Extensive experimental studies on directed and undirected, as well as synthetic and real-world networks suggest that: 1) the proposed CNN-based methodology performs excellently in the prediction of the connectedness robustness of complex networks as a process; 2) it performs fairly well as the indicator for the connectedness robustness, compared to other predictive measures.