The attack tolerance of community structure in complex networks

Robustness is an important property of complex networks. Up to now, there are plentiful researches focusing on the network's robustness containing error and attack tolerance of network's connectivity and the shortest path. In this paper, the error and attack tolerance of network's community structure are studies through randomly and purposely disturbing interaction of networks. Two purposely perturbation methods are designed, that one methods is based on cluster coefficient and the other is attacking triangle. Dissimilarity function D is used to quantify the changes of community structure and modularity Q is used to quantify the significance of community structure. The numerical results show that after perturbation, network's community structure is damaged to be more unclear. It is also discovered that purposely attacking damages more to the community structure than randomly attacking.