Evaluating Backbones

The measures module provides metrics for evaluating how well a backbone preserves the properties of the original network.

Basic fraction metrics

These functions measure what fraction of the original graph is retained in the backbone.

node_fraction()

Fraction of nodes that have at least one edge in the backbone. Isolated nodes are excluded from the count in both the original and backbone:

nb.node_fraction(G, backbone)  # e.g. 0.85

edge_fraction()

Fraction of original edges retained in the backbone:

nb.edge_fraction(G, backbone)  # e.g. 0.30

weight_fraction()

Fraction of total edge weight retained:

nb.weight_fraction(G, backbone)  # e.g. 0.65

Connectivity

reachability()

Fraction of node pairs that can communicate through the backbone. Returns 1.0 for a connected backbone, 0.0 for a completely disconnected one:

nb.reachability(backbone)  # e.g. 1.0

Distribution preservation

These functions use the Kolmogorov-Smirnov statistic to compare distributions between the original graph and the backbone. Lower values indicate better preservation.

ks_degree()

KS statistic between the degree distributions:

nb.ks_degree(G, backbone)  # e.g. 0.12

ks_weight()

KS statistic between the edge weight distributions:

nb.ks_weight(G, backbone)  # e.g. 0.08

Comparing multiple backbones

compare_backbones() provides a systematic way to evaluate multiple backbone methods on the same graph:

import networkx as nx
import networkx_backbone as nb

G = nx.les_miserables_graph()

backbones = {
    "disparity": nb.threshold_filter(
        nb.disparity_filter(G), "disparity_pvalue", 0.05
    ),
    "metric": nb.boolean_filter(nb.metric_backbone(G), "metric_keep"),
    "mst": nb.boolean_filter(nb.maximum_spanning_tree_backbone(G), "mst_keep"),
}

results = nb.compare_backbones(G, backbones)

The results dictionary maps each backbone name to a dictionary of measure names and their values.

You can also pass custom measures as callables:

results = nb.compare_backbones(
    G,
    backbones,
    measures=[nb.edge_fraction, nb.reachability, nb.ks_degree],
)