Opinion Divergence Reveals the Hierarchical and Overlapping Community Structure in Networks

Abstract

Often exhibiting hierarchical and overlapping structures, communities or modular groups are fundamental and complex in network science. One of the most exploited tools to detect the mesoscopic structure is synchronization. Several phenomena including convergence rate and local convergence under constraints are studied to uncover the existence and features of communities. Here, employing a background of opinion dynamics, we study the divergence of agents' opinions, i.e. the state differences of nodes, in the progress of reaching global consensus and then reveal its connections with hierarchy and overlap in the modular structure. Furthermore, based on the obtained close relationships, a new method is proposed to identify hierarchical and overlapping communities, whose robustness and efficiency are validated via experiments on real and artificial networks. Both the connections and approaches provide a novel insight on the features of modular structures in networks.

References in corpus (18)

• Fast unfolding of communities in large networks
• Community structure in social and biological networks
• Finding and evaluating community structure in networks
• Community detection in graphs
• Uncovering the overlapping community structure of complex networks in nature and society
• Cooperative Game Theory Approaches for Network Partitioning
• The structure of scientific collaboration networks
• Near linear time algorithm to detect community structures in large-scale networks
• Benchmark graphs for testing community detection algorithms
• Hierarchical structure and the prediction of missing links in networks
• Link communities reveal multiscale complexity in networks
• Detecting the overlapping and hierarchical community structure of complex networks
• Benchmarks for testing community detection algorithms on directed and weighted graphs with overlapping communities
• The map equation
• Synchronization reveals topological scales in complex networks
• Coauthorship and citation in scientific publishing
• Synchronization interfaces and overlapping communities in complex networks
• Diffusion geometry unravels the emergence of functional clusters in collective phenomena