0000000000362335
AUTHOR
Antonio Liotta
showing 8 related works from this author
Correlations among Game of Thieves and other centrality measures in complex networks
2021
Social Network Analysis (SNA) is used to study the exchange of resources among individuals, groups, or organizations. The role of individuals or connections in a network is described by a set of centrality metrics which represent one of the most important results of SNA. Degree, closeness, betweenness and clustering coefficient are the most used centrality measures. Their use is, however, severely hampered by their computation cost. This issue can be overcome by an algorithm called Game of Thieves (GoT). Thanks to this new algorithm, we can compute the importance of all elements in a network (i.e. vertices and edges), compared to the total number of vertices. This calculation is done not in…
Criminal networks analysis in missing data scenarios through graph distances
2021
Data collected in criminal investigations may suffer from issues like: (i) incompleteness, due to the covert nature of criminal organizations; (ii) incorrectness, caused by either unintentional data collection errors or intentional deception by criminals; (iii) inconsistency, when the same information is collected into law enforcement databases multiple times, or in different formats. In this paper we analyze nine real criminal networks of different nature (i.e., Mafia networks, criminal street gangs and terrorist organizations) in order to quantify the impact of incomplete data, and to determine which network type is most affected by it. The networks are firstly pruned using two specific m…
Social network analysis: the use of graph distances to compare artificial and criminal networks
2021
Aim: Italian criminal groups become more and more dangerous spreading their activities into new sectors. A criminal group is made up of networks of hundreds of family gangs which extended their influence across the world, raking in billions from drug trafficking, extortion and money laundering. We focus in particular on the analysis of the social structure of two Sicilian crime families and we used a Social Network Analysis approach to study the social phenomena. Starting from a real criminal network extracted from meetings emerging from the police physical surveillance during 2000s, we here aim to create artificial models that present similar properties. Methods: We use specific tools of s…
Correlation Analysis of Node and Edge Centrality Measures in Artificial Complex Networks
2021
The role of an actor in a social network is identified through a set of measures called centrality. Degree centrality, betweenness centrality, closeness centrality, and clustering coefficient are the most frequently used metrics to compute the node centrality. Their computational complexity in some cases makes unfeasible, when not practically impossible, their computations. For this reason, we focused on two alternative measures, WERW-Kpath and Game of Thieves, which are at the same time highly descriptive and computationally affordable. Our experiments show that a strong correlation exists between WERW-Kpath and Game of Thieves and the classical centrality measures. This may suggest the po…
Disrupting resilient criminal networks through data analysis: The case of Sicilian Mafia
2020
Compared to other types of social networks, criminal networks present hard challenges, due to their strong resilience to disruption, which poses severe hurdles to law-enforcement agencies. Herein, we borrow methods and tools from Social Network Analysis to (i) unveil the structure of Sicilian Mafia gangs, based on two real-world datasets, and (ii) gain insights as to how to efficiently disrupt them. Mafia networks have peculiar features, due to the links distribution and strength, which makes them very different from other social networks, and extremely robust to exogenous perturbations. Analysts are also faced with the difficulty in collecting reliable datasets that accurately describe the…
Social Network Analysis of Sicilian Mafia Interconnections
2019
In this paper, we focus on the study of Sicilian Mafia organizations through Social Network Analysis. We analyse datasets reflecting two different Mafia Families, based on examinations of digital trails and judicial documents, respectively. The first dataset includes the phone calls logs among suspected individuals. The second one is based on police traces of meeting that have taken place among different types of criminals. Our breakthrough is twofold. First in the method followed to generate these new datasets. Second, in the method used to carry out a quantitative phenomena investigation that are hard to evaluate. Our networks are weighted ones, with each weight catching the frequency of …
Game of Thieves and WERW-Kpath: Two Novel Measures of Node and Edge Centrality for Mafia Networks
2021
Real-world complex systems can be modeled as homogeneous or heterogeneous graphs composed by nodes connected by edges. The importance of nodes and edges is formally described by a set of measures called centralities which are typically studied for graphs of small size. The proliferation of digital collection of data has led to huge graphs with billions of nodes and edges. For this reason, we focus on two new algorithms, Game of Thieves and WERW-Kpath which are computationally-light alternatives to the canonical centrality measures such as degree, node and edge betweenness, closeness and clustering. We explore the correlation among these measures using the Spearman’s correlation coefficient …
Graph Comparison and Artificial Models for Simulating Real Criminal Networks
2021
Network Science is an active research field, with numerous applications in areas like computer science, economics, or sociology. Criminal networks, in particular, possess specific topologies which allow them to exhibit strong resilience to disruption. Starting from a dataset related to meetings between members of a Mafia organization which operated in Sicily during 2000s, we here aim to create artificial models with similar properties. To this end, we use specific tools of Social Network Analysis, including network models (Barabási-Albert identified to be the most promising) and metrics which allow us to quantify the similarity between two networks. To the best of our knowledge, the DeltaCo…