Community structure of the pseudofractal web
Abstract
The Ramsey community number is the smallest network size at which a graph is better described by a partition into communities than by no partition, under a prescribed detection rule. On a scale-free graph this question is confounded: a block model can split the network merely to absorb its degree distribution. I compute analytically for the deterministic pseudofractal scale-free web of Dorogovtsev, Goltsev, and Mendes, separating genuine community structure from degree heterogeneity with two closed-form detection rules. Under a plain Bernoulli stochastic block model, the web's natural recursive bipartition is unpreferred while small and breaks at nodes, with a log-evidence growing as . Under a degree-corrected model tested against the configuration-model null, the same partition survives, breaking far earlier at , with a log-evidence growing as -- exactly twice the plain slope, and independent of the prior. Degree correction reverses the ordering of the candidate cuts, demoting the hub-leaf split and elevating the recursive one. Because the web is self-similar, the best description is not two communities but a nested hierarchy: the degree-corrected evidence keeps rising as the partition is refined, and is maximised at of order communities of nodes. A purely local recursive rule thus builds true hierarchical community structure, over and above the scale-free degree sequence it also produces, in an exactly solvable setting.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2607.03010,
title = {Community structure of the pseudofractal web},
author = {Alexei Vazquez},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2607.03010},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
7 pages, 5 figures