Emergence and persistence of communities in coevolutionary networks

TL;DR

This paper explores how communities form and persist in coevolutionary networks through adaptive rewiring and simple node dynamics, revealing conditions that promote stable community structures and diversity.

Contribution

It introduces a model combining adaptive rewiring with voterlike node dynamics, showing how communities emerge and persist under certain parameters and noise conditions.

Findings

Community structures emerge under specific adaptive rewiring parameters.

The lifetime of communities scales exponentially with system size.

Small noise sustains diversity and community persistence over time.

Abstract

We investigate the emergence and persistence of communities through a recently proposed mechanism of adaptive rewiring in coevolutionary networks. We characterize the topological structures arising in a coevolutionary network subject to an adaptive rewiring process and a node dynamics given by a simple voterlike rule. We find that, for some values of the parameters describing the adaptive rewiring process, a community structure emerges on a connected network. We show that the emergence of communities is associated to a decrease in the number of active links in the system, i.e. links that connect two nodes in different states. The lifetime of the community structure state scales exponentially with the size of the system. Additionally, we find that a small noise in the node dynamics can sustain a diversity of states and a community structure in time in a finite size system. Thus, large system size and/or local noise can explain the persistence of communities and diversity in many real systems.