Modularity of preferential attachment graphs
Abstract
We study the preferential attachment model . A graph is generated from a finite initial graph by adding new vertices one at a time. Each new vertex connects to already existing vertices, and these are chosen with probability proportional to their current degrees. We are particularly interested in the community structure of , which is expressed in terms of the so-called modularity. We prove that the modularity of is with high probability upper bounded by a function that tends to as 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 . The key ingredient here is the definition of the function , 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.
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