We study the directed and weighted network in which the wards of London are vertices and two vertices are connected whenever there is at least one person commuting to work from a ward to another. Remarkably the in-strength and in-degree distribution tail is a power law with exponent around -2, while the out-strength and out-degree distribution tail is exponential. We propose a simple square lattice model to explain the observed empirical behaviour.
Inter-firm organizations, which play a driving role in the economy of a country, can be represented in the form of a customer-supplier network. Such a network exhibits a heavy-tailed degree distribution, disassortative mixing and a prominent community structure. We analyze a large-scale data set of customer-supplier relationships containing data from one million Japanese firms. Using a directed network framework, we show that the production network exhibits the characteristics listed above. We conduct detailed investigations to characterize the communities in the network. The topology within smaller communities is found to be very close to a tree-like structure but becomes denser as the community size increases. A large fraction (~40%) of firms with relatively small in- or out-degrees have customers or suppliers solely from within their own communities, indicating interactions of a highly local nature. The interaction strengths between communities as measured by the inter-community link weights follow a highly heterogeneous distribution. We further present the statistically significant over-expressions of different prefectures and sectors within different communities.
In this paper we present an empirical study of the worldwide maritime transportation network (WMN) in which the nodes are ports and links are container liners connecting the ports. Using the different representation of network topology namely the space $L$ and $P$, we study the statistical properties of WMN including degree distribution, degree correlations, weight distribution, strength distribution, average shortest path length, line length distribution and centrality measures. We find that WMN is a small-world network with power law behavior. Important nodes are identified based on different centrality measures. Through analyzing weighted cluster coefficient and weighted average nearest neighbors degree, we reveal the hierarchy structure and rich-club phenomenon in the network.
Stars and cycles are basic structures in network construction. The former has been well studied in network analysis, while the latter attracted rare attention. A node together with its neighbors constitute a neighborhood star-structure where the basic assumption is two nodes interact through their direct connection. A cycle is a closed loop with many nodes who can influence each other even without direct connection. Here we show their difference and relationship in understanding network structure and function. We define two cycle-based node characteristics, namely cycle number and cycle ratio, which can be used to measure a nodes importance. Numerical analyses on six disparate real networks suggest that the nodes with higher cycle ratio are more important to network connectivity, while cycle number can better quantify a node influence of cycle-based spreading than the common star-based node centralities. We also find that an ordinary network can be converted into a hypernetwork by considering its basic cycles as hyperedges, meanwhile, a new matrix called the cycle number matrix is captured. We hope that this paper can open a new direction of understanding both local and global structures of network and its function.
The concept of community detection has long been used as a key device for handling the mesoscale structures in networks. Suitably conducted community detection reveals various embedded informative substructures of network topology. However, regarding the practical usage of community detection, it has always been a tricky problem to assign a reasonable community resolution for networks of interest. Because of the absence of the unanimously accepted criterion, most of the previous studies utilized rather ad hoc heuristics to decide the community resolution. In this work, we harness the concept of consistency in community structures of networks to provide the overall community resolution landscape of networks, which we eventually take to quantify the reliability of detected communities for a given resolution parameter. More precisely, we exploit the ambiguity in the results of stochastic detection algorithms and suggest a method that denotes the relative validity of community structures in regard to their stability of global and local inconsistency measures using multiple detection processes. Applying our framework to synthetic and real networks, we confirm that it effectively displays insightful fundamental aspects of community structures.
We study the self-organization of the consonant inventories through a complex network approach. We observe that the distribution of occurrence as well as cooccurrence of the consonants across languages follow a power-law behavior. The co-occurrence network of consonants exhibits a high clustering coefficient. We propose four novel synthesis models for these networks (each of which is a refinement of the earlier) so as to successively match with higher accuracy (a) the above mentioned topological properties as well as (b) the linguistic property of feature economy exhibited by the consonant inventories. We conclude by arguing that a possible interpretation of this mechanism of network growth is the process of child language acquisition. Such models essentially increase our understanding of the structure of languages that is influenced by their evolutionary dynamics and this, in turn, can be extremely useful for building future NLP applications.