Priority Attachment: a Comprehensive Mechanism for Generating Networks

TL;DR

This paper introduces the priority attachment mechanism as a versatile and interpretable way to generate diverse synthetic and empirical networks, unifying and extending previous network formation theories.

Contribution

It presents the priority attachment mechanism and the Priority Rank model, a new network generation method based on this mechanism, capable of replicating various network topologies.

Findings

Priority attachment generalizes existing mechanisms like small world and preferential attachment.

The Priority Rank model can generate networks with diverse topologies.

The mechanism aligns with observed patterns in real-world networks.

Abstract

We claim that networks are created according to the priority attachment mechanism and we show a simple model which uses the priority attachment to generate both synthetic and close to empirical networks. Priority attachment is a mechanism which generalizes previously proposed mechanisms, such as small world creation or preferential attachment, but we also observe its presence in a range of real-world networks. In this paper we show that by using priority attachment we can generate networks of very diverse topologies, as well as recreate empirical networks. An additional advantage of the priority attachment mechanism is an easy interpretation of the latent processes of network formation. We substantiate our claims by performing numerical experiments on synthetic and empirical networks. The two main contributions of the paper are: the introduction of the priority attachment mechanism, and the design of the Priority Rank: a simple network generative model based on the priority attachment mechanism.