The Network HHD: Quantifying Cyclic Competition in Trait-Performance Models of Tournaments

TL;DR

This paper introduces the Helmholtz-Hodge decomposition (HHD) as a method to quantify cyclic competition in tournament models, linking intransitivity to trait-based performance and providing explicit calculations for expected intransitivity.

Contribution

It demonstrates that the HHD naturally decomposes tournament structures, offers statistical interpretations, and connects trait-performance models to measures of intransitivity.

Findings

HHD effectively separates transitive and cyclic components in tournaments.

Increasing the number of competitors promotes cyclic competition.

Higher correlation in performance across pairs promotes transitive competition.

Abstract

Competitive tournaments appear in sports, politics, population ecology, and animal behavior. All of these fields have developed methods for rating competitors and ranking them accordingly. A tournament is intransitive if it is not consistent with any ranking. Intransitive tournaments contain rock-paper-scissor type cycles. The discrete Helmholtz-Hodge decomposition (HHD) is well adapted to describing intransitive tournaments. It separates a tournament into perfectly transitive and perfectly cyclic components, where the perfectly transitive component is associated with a set of ratings. The size of the cyclic component can be used as a measure of intransitivity. Here we show that the HHD arises naturally from two classes of tournaments with simple statistical interpretations. We then discuss six different sets of assumptions that define equivalent decompositions. This analysis motivates the choice to use the HHD among other existing methods. Success in competition is typically mediated by the traits of the competitors. A trait-performance model assumes that the probability that one competitor beats another can be expressed as a function of their traits. We show that, if the traits of each competitor are drawn independently and identically from a trait distribution then the expected degree of intransitivity in the network can be computed explicitly. Using this result we show that increasing the number of pairs of competitors who could compete promotes cyclic competition, and that increasing the correlation in the performance of $A$ against $B$ with the performance of $A$ against $C$ promotes transitive competition. The expected size of cyclic competition can thus be understood by analyzing this correlation. An illustrative example is provided.