Predicting Graph Categories from Structural Properties

Complex networks are often categorized according to the underlying phenomena that they represent such as molecular interactions, re-tweets, and brain activity. In this work, we investigate the problem of predicting the category (domain) of arbitrary networks. This includes complex networks from different domains as well as synthetically generated graphs from five different network models. A classification accuracy of $96.6\%$ is achieved using a random forest classifier with both real and synthetic networks. This work makes two important findings. First, our results indicate that complex networks from various domains have distinct structural properties that allow us to predict with high accuracy the category of a new previously unseen network. Second, synthetic graphs are trivial to classify as the classification model can predict with near-certainty the network model used to generate it. Overall, the results demonstrate that networks drawn from different domains (and network models) are trivial to distinguish using only a handful of simple structural properties.