A network function-based definition of communities in complex networks. 2012

Sanjeev Chauhan, and Michelle Girvan, and Edward Ott
Institute for Research in Electronics and Applied Physics, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland 20742, USA.

We consider an alternate definition of community structure that is functionally motivated. We define network community structure based on the function the network system is intended to perform. In particular, as a specific example of this approach, we consider communities whose function is enhanced by the ability to synchronize and/or by resilience to node failures. Previous work has shown that, in many cases, the largest eigenvalue of the network's adjacency matrix controls the onset of both synchronization and percolation processes. Thus, for networks whose functional performance is dependent on these processes, we propose a method that divides a given network into communities based on maximizing a function of the largest eigenvalues of the adjacency matrices of the resulting communities. We also explore the differences between the partitions obtained by our method and the modularity approach (which is based solely on consideration of network structure). We do this for several different classes of networks. We find that, in many cases, modularity-based partitions do almost as well as our function-based method in finding functional communities, even though modularity does not specifically incorporate consideration of function.

UI MeSH Term Description Entries

Related Publications

Sanjeev Chauhan, and Michelle Girvan, and Edward Ott
December 2013, Chaos (Woodbury, N.Y.),
Sanjeev Chauhan, and Michelle Girvan, and Edward Ott
January 2013, Scientific reports,
Sanjeev Chauhan, and Michelle Girvan, and Edward Ott
April 2018, Chaos (Woodbury, N.Y.),
Sanjeev Chauhan, and Michelle Girvan, and Edward Ott
January 2018, PloS one,
Sanjeev Chauhan, and Michelle Girvan, and Edward Ott
September 2017, Chaos (Woodbury, N.Y.),
Sanjeev Chauhan, and Michelle Girvan, and Edward Ott
January 2018, BioMed research international,
Sanjeev Chauhan, and Michelle Girvan, and Edward Ott
October 2008, Physical review letters,
Sanjeev Chauhan, and Michelle Girvan, and Edward Ott
May 2022, The journal of physical chemistry letters,
Sanjeev Chauhan, and Michelle Girvan, and Edward Ott
January 2019, PloS one,
Copied contents to your clipboard!