2024/01/22 by Shane Mannion, Pádraig MacCarron, Mannion, Shane +5
Computer Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Cellular Automata and Applications #Complex Network Analysis Techniques #FOS: Physical sciences #Opinion Dynamics and Social Influence #Physics and Society (physics.soc-ph)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2401.12047
openalex publication_date 2024/01/22 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
In this paper we introduce a new, fast, degree-preserving rewiring algorithm for altering the assortativity of complex networks, which we call Fast total link (FTL) rewiring algorithm. Commonly used existing algorithms require a large number of iterations, in particular in the case of large dense networks. This can especially be problematic when we wish to study ensembles of networks. In this work we aim to overcome aforementioned scalability problems by performing a rewiring of all edges at once to achieve a very high assortativity value before rewiring samples of edges at once to reduce this high assortativity value to the target value. The proposed method performs better than existing methods by several orders of magnitude for a range of structurally diverse complex networks, both in terms of the number of iterations taken, and time taken to reach a given assortativity value. Here we test our proposed algorithm on networks with up to 100,000 nodes and around 750,000 edges and find that the relative improvements in speed remain, showing that the algorithm is both efficient and scalable.