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I have a bidirectional network where the weights of edges are based on partial correlation matrix. I have both positive and negative values as weights. Now, I want to compute centrality measures as degree, closeness, betweenness and eigenvector. How can I handle the negative values? Would I get correct values for these measures, if I keep the negatives? Should I use absolute value or take (1-absolute value)?

Basically, I am confused about if these values would affect the outcome in any way. I have not found any resources that would discuss this. Please recommend, if you know any.

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These measures are in general designed for unweighted graphs, and extending them to weighted graphs already is non-trivial. Extending them to signed weighted graph is even more difficult.

For instance, closeness and betweenness are both based on distances and shortest paths. In a (positively) weighted graph, the weight of a path already has several natural extensions: one may take the maximal weight of an edge in the path (think of weights as capacities), or the product of edge weight (think of weights as probabilities), their sum (think of weights as traversal costs), or others. If the weights may be negative, then such extensions become much more tricky. For instance, what may a path composed of positive and negative edges mean?

Still, if your think of degrees, and define the weighted degree as the sum of absolute values of edge weights, then a high weighted degree indicates that the vertex is highly (positively or negatively) correlated to others. However, it will make no distinction between a vertex highly correlated to a few others, and a vertex poorly correlated to many others.

In conclusion, I think there is no simple and general answer to your question. More information is needed on what you are modelling, what you want to capture with centralities. The best option may be to design a centrality measure tailored for your specific context and objective.

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  • $\begingroup$ I'm coding this in R and for degree measure, for instance, it takes the number of nodes that is connected to the specified node. It doesn't take the weight into account. As in closeness and betweenness, they are based on shortest path. My question is whether this negative values affect the shortest path? I get similar results for measures, which somehow verifies that they are outputting the same thing, but still I'm not 100% sure. As in eigenvector measure, it takes the weights but tbh, I don't clearly understand how it calculates the output. $\endgroup$
    – statwoman
    Commented Jul 25, 2021 at 22:09
  • $\begingroup$ Then, it seems to me that you are looking for information on the actual implementation of the library you use, right? This would not really fit the scope of MathOverflow. Still, you may transform your initial graph into unsigned/unweighted versions and check that results stay the same. $\endgroup$ Commented Jul 26, 2021 at 5:56
  • $\begingroup$ In general, I want to understand the concept, if we have negative values on edges in an undirected graph, and we want to calculate the shortest path, do we consider the negative values as negative or we just take the absolute value since it is undirected? Thank you! $\endgroup$
    – statwoman
    Commented Jul 27, 2021 at 15:24

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