1. Kaleidoscopic reorganization of network communities across different scales
- Author
-
Jeong, Wonhee, Lee, Daekyung, Kim, Heetae, and Lee, Sang Hoon
- Subjects
Physics - Physics and Society ,Condensed Matter - Statistical Mechanics ,Computer Science - Social and Information Networks - Abstract
The notion of structural heterogeneity is pervasive in real networks, and their community organization is no exception. Still, a vast majority of community detection methods assume neatly hierarchically organized communities of a characteristic scale for a given hierarchical level. In this work, we demonstrate that the reality of scale-dependent community reorganization is convoluted with simultaneous processes of community splitting and merging, challenging the conventional understanding of community-scale adjustment. We provide the mathematical argument on the modularity function, the results from the real-network analysis, and a simple network model for a comprehensive understanding of the nontrivial community reorganization process characterized by a local dip in the number of communities as the resolution parameter varies. This study suggests a need for a paradigm shift in the study of network communities, which emphasizes the importance of considering scale-dependent reorganization to better understand the genuine structural organization of networks., Comment: 6 pages, 5 figures
- Published
- 2024