HIF: The hypergraph interchange format for higher-order networks

TL;DR

The paper introduces the Hypergraph Interchange Format (HIF), a standardized JSON-based format designed to facilitate seamless data exchange among various higher-order network analysis software tools, supporting multiple hypergraph types and metadata.

Contribution

It presents HIF as a unified, extensible format that addresses fragmentation in higher-order network analysis software ecosystems, enabling interoperability and data sharing.

Findings

HIF supports undirected and directed hypergraphs, as well as simplicial complexes.

Provides a JSON schema, documentation, and example datasets.

Facilitates interoperability among popular hypergraph analysis tools.

Abstract

Many empirical systems contain complex interactions of arbitrary size, representing, for example, chemical reactions, social groups, co-authorship relationships, and ecological dependencies. These interactions are known as higher-order interactions and the collection of these interactions comprise a higher-order network, or hypergraph. Hypergraphs have established themselves as a popular and versatile mathematical representation of such systems and a number of software packages written in various programming languages have been designed to analyze these networks. However, the ecosystem of higher-order network analysis software is fragmented due to specialization of each software's programming interface and compatible data representations. To enable seamless data exchange between higher-order network analysis software packages, we introduce the Hypergraph Interchange Format (HIF), a standardized format for storing higher-order network data. HIF supports multiple types of higher-order networks, including undirected hypergraphs, directed hypergraphs, and abstract simplicial complexes, while actively exploring extensions to represent multiplex hypergraphs, temporal hypergraphs, and ordered hypergraphs. To accommodate the wide variety of metadata used in different contexts, HIF also includes support for attributes associated with nodes, edges, and incidences. This initiative is a collaborative effort involving authors, maintainers, and contributors from prominent hypergraph software packages. This project introduces a JSON schema with corresponding documentation and unit tests, example HIF-compliant datasets, and tutorials demonstrating the use of HIF with several popular higher-order network analysis software packages.