Communities and Hierarchical Organization of Links in Complex Networks
Abstract
Modular and hierarchical organization are two of the most important organizing principles observed in many complex networks. It has often been assumed that detecting a hierarchy also implies finding modular structure. However, highly overlapping community structure, present in many real networks including social and biological networks, interferes with discovery of hierarchy since a node's membership in multiple communities precludes a unique hierarchical position. We propose a novel viewpoint: a community now consists of a set of links and a network is organized by a hierarchy of links. This viewpoint enables us to naturally incorporate both hierarchical and modular organization even in the presence of strong overlap. We introduce and apply a general and effective method to infer the structural organization of links, underscoring the power of a link-centric viewpoint.Keywords
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