The inherent community structure of hyperbolic networks

TL;DR

This paper reveals that hyperbolic network models naturally produce community structures, enhancing their relevance for modeling real-world networks which often exhibit such modular organization.

Contribution

It uncovers the unexpected presence of community structures in hyperbolic network models, supported by consistent community detection results across multiple algorithms.

Findings

Networks generated by hyperbolic models contain pronounced communities.

Community structures are consistent across different detection algorithms.

Hyperbolic models better represent real networks with community organization.

Abstract

A remarkable approach for grasping the relevant statistical features of real networks with the help of random graphs is offered by hyperbolic models, centred around the idea of placing nodes in a low-dimensional hyperbolic space, and connecting node pairs with a probability depending on the hyperbolic distance. It is widely appreciated that these models can generate random graphs that are small-world, highly clustered and scale-free at the same time; thus, reproducing the most fundamental common features of real networks. In the present work, we focus on a less well-known property of the popularity-similarity optimisation (PSO) model and the $\mathbb{S}^1/\mathbb{H}^2$ model from this model family, namely that the networks generated by these approaches also contain communities for a wide range of the parameters, which was certainly not an intention at the design of the models. We extracted the communities from the studied networks using well-established community finding methods such as Louvain, Infomap and label propagation. The observed high modularity values indicate that the community structure can become very pronounced under certain conditions. In addition, the modules found by the different algorithms show good consistency, implying that these are indeed relevant and apparent structural units. Since the appearance of communities is rather common in networks representing real systems as well, this feature of hyperbolic models makes them even more suitable for describing real networks than thought before.