2024/09/27 by Wonhee Jeong, W. G. Jeong, Daekyung Lee +2 · 1 voice
Computer Science · Physics and Astronomy · Social Sciences · #Complex Network Analysis Techniques #Evolutionary Game Theory and Cooperation #Opinion Dynamics and Social Influence #cond-mat.stat-mech #cs.SI #physics.soc-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physreve.111.014312
arxiv published 2024/09/27 · openalex publication_date 2025/01/21 · arxiv updated 2025/01/21 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/11
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 a mathematical argument concerning the modularity function, the results from real-network analysis, and a simple network model for a comprehensive understanding of the nontrivial community reorganization process. The reorganization is characterized by a local drop 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.