English

Modularity of preferential attachment graphs

Probability 2026-01-12 v4

Abstract

We study the preferential attachment model GnhG_n^h. A graph GnhG_n^h is generated from a finite initial graph by adding new vertices one at a time. Each new vertex connects to h1h\ge 1 already existing vertices, and these are chosen with probability proportional to their current degrees. We are particularly interested in the community structure of GnhG_n^h, which is expressed in terms of the so-called modularity. We prove that the modularity of GnhG_n^h is with high probability upper bounded by a function that tends to 00 as hh tends to infinity. This resolves the conjecture of Prokhorenkova, Pralat, and Raigorodskii from 2016. As a byproduct, we obtain novel concentration results (which are interesting in their own right) for the volume and edge density parameters of vertex subsets of GnhG_n^h. The key ingredient here is the definition of the function μ\mu, which serves as a natural measure for vertex subsets, and is proportional to the average size of their volumes. This extends previous results on the topic by Frieze, Pralat, P\'erez-Gim\'enez, and Reiniger from 2019.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2501.06771,
  title  = {Modularity of preferential attachment graphs},
  author = {Katarzyna Rybarczyk and Małgorzata Sulkowska},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2501.06771},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

24 pages

R2 v1 2026-06-28T21:03:49.588Z