Structural preferential attachment: Network organization beyond the link

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel network model emphasizing communities as fundamental units, explaining universal properties like scale independence and modularity, and capturing self-similar structures in complex systems.

Contribution

It presents a new mechanism for network organization that models communities as core components, unifying various properties under a community-centric framework.

Findings

Model reproduces social and information network structures

Predicts community interconnections and self-similarity

Explains universal properties of complex networks

Abstract

We introduce a mechanism which models the emergence of the universal properties of complex networks, such as scale independence, modularity and self-similarity, and unifies them under a scale-free organization beyond the link. This brings a new perspective on network organization where communities, instead of links, are the fundamental building blocks of complex systems. We show how our simple model can reproduce social and information networks by predicting their community structure and more importantly, how their nodes or communities are interconnected, often in a self-similar manner.