Abstract
Many networks are characterized by the presence of communities, densely intra-connected groups with sparser inter-connections between groups. We propose a community overlay network representation to capture large-scale properties of communities. A community overlay G o can be constructed upon a network G, called the underlying network, by (a) aggregating each community in G as a node in the overlay G o ; (b) connecting two nodes in the overlay if the corresponding two communities in the underlying network have a number of direct links in between, (c) assigning to each node/link in the overlay a node/link weight, which represents e.g. the percentage of links in/between the corresponding underlying communities. The community overlays have been constructed upon a large number of real-world networks based on communities detected via five algorithms. Surprisingly, we find the following seemingly universal properties: (i) an overlay has a smaller degree-degree correlation than its underlying network ρ o (D l+, D l−) < ρ(D l+, D l−) and is mostly disassortative ρ o (D l+, D l−) < 0; (ii) a community containing a large number W i of nodes tends to connect to many other communities ρ o (W i , D i ) > 0. We explain the generic observation (i) by two facts: (1) degree-degree correlation or assortativity tends to be positively correlated with modularity; (2) by aggregating each community as a node, the modularity in the overlay is reduced and so is the assortativity. The observation (i) implies that the assortativity of a network depends on the aggregation level of the network representation, which is illustrated by the Internet topology at router and AS level.
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Ge, X., Wang, H. Community overlays upon real-world complex networks. Eur. Phys. J. B 85, 26 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1140/epjb/e2011-20129-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1140/epjb/e2011-20129-7