Higher-order interactions provide a nuanced understanding of the relational structure of complex systems beyond traditional pairwise interactions. However, higher-order network analyses also incur more cumbersome interpretations and greater computational demands than their pairwise counterparts. Here we present an information-theoretic framework for determining the extent to which a hypergraph representation of a networked system is structurally redundant, and for identifying its most critical higher orders of interaction that allow us to remove these redundancies while preserving essential higher-order structure.
@article{arxiv.2601.02603,
title = {Structural reducibility of hypergraphs},
author = {Alec Kirkley and Helcio Felippe and Federico Battiston},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.02603},
year = {2026}
}