An Empirical Study of the Relation Between Community Structure and Transitivity

Günce Keziban Orman (1, 2) , Vincent Labatut (3) , Hocine Cherifi (1)

1 Le2i - Laboratoire Electronique, Informatique et Image [UMR6306]
2 BIT Lab - BIT lab
3 Bit Lab

One of the most prominent properties in real-world networks is the presence of a community structure, i.e. dense and loosely interconnected groups of nodes called communities. In an attempt to better understand this concept, we study the relationship between the strength of the community structure and the network transitivity (or clustering coefficient). Although intuitively appealing, this analysis was not performed before. We adopt an approach based on random models to empirically study how one property varies depending on the other. It turns out the transitivity increases with the community structure strength, and is also affected by the distribution of the community sizes. Furthermore, increasing the transitivity also results in a stronger community structure. More surprisingly, if a very weak community structure causes almost zero transitivity, the opposite is not true and a network with a close to zero transitivity can still have a clearly defined community structure. Further analytical work is necessary to characterize the ex-act nature of the identified relationship.

Mots clés: transitivity; Clustering; Community Structure; Complex Networks

Domaines: Vision par ordinateur et reconnaissance de formes [cs.CV]

Günce Keziban Orman, Vincent Labatut, Hocine Cherifi. An Empirical Study of the Relation Between Community Structure and Transitivity. 3rd Workshop on Complex Networks, Mar 2012, Melbourne, Florida, United States. pp.99-110, ⟨10.1007/978-3-642-30287-9_11⟩. ⟨hal-00717707⟩