A New Method for Extracting the Hierarchical Organization of Networks

作者:Zhan, Weihua*; Guan, Jihong; Zhang, Z*******
来源:International Journal of Information Technology and Decision Making, 2017, 16(5): 1359-1385.
DOI:10.1142/S021962201450028X

摘要

Extracting the hierarchical organization of networks is currently a pressing task for understanding complex networked systems. The hierarchy of a network is essentially defined by the heterogeneity of link densities of communities at different scales. Here, we define a top-level partition (TLP) as a bipartition of the network (or a sub-network) such that no top-level community (TLC) runs across the two parts. It has been found that a TLP generally has a higher modularity than a non-top-level (TLP) partition when their TLCs have similar sizes and when the link densities of neighboring levels are well separated from each other. A spectral TLP procedure is proposed here to search for TLPs of a network (or sub-network). To extract the hierarchical organization of large complex networks, an algorithm called TLPA has been developed based on the TLP. Experiments have shown that the method developed in this research extract hierarchy accurately from network data.