English

Measuring and Modeling Bipartite Graphs with Community Structure

Social and Information Networks 2017-09-20 v2 Physics and Society

Abstract

Network science is a powerful tool for analyzing complex systems in fields ranging from sociology to engineering to biology. This paper is focused on generative models of large-scale bipartite graphs, also known as two-way graphs or two-mode networks. We propose two generative models that can be easily tuned to reproduce the characteristics of real-world networks, not just qualitatively, but quantitatively. The characteristics we consider are the degree distributions and the metamorphosis coefficient. The metamorphosis coefficient, a bipartite analogue of the clustering coefficient, is the proportion of length-three paths that participate in length-four cycles. Having a high metamorphosis coefficient is a necessary condition for close-knit community structure. We define edge, node, and degreewise metamorphosis coefficients, enabling a more detailed understanding of the bipartite connectivity that is not explained by degree distribution alone. Our first model, bipartite Chung-Lu (CL), is able to reproduce real-world degree distributions, and our second model, bipartite block two-level Erd\"os-R\'enyi (BTER), reproduces both the degree distributions as well as the degreewise metamorphosis coefficients. We demonstrate the effectiveness of these models on several real-world data sets.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1607.08673,
  title  = {Measuring and Modeling Bipartite Graphs with Community Structure},
  author = {Sinan Aksoy and Tamara G. Kolda and Ali Pinar},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1607.08673},
  year   = {2017}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-22T15:07:22.155Z