Comparing overlapping properties of real bipartite networks

Fabien Tarissan

In ISCS 2014: Interdisciplinary Symposium on Complex Systems, Emergence, Complexity and Computation, 14:309-318, Springer, 2014.

Many real-world networks lend themselves to the use of graphs for analysing and modelling their structure. But such a simple representation has proven to miss some important and non trivial properties hidden in the bipartite structure of the networks. Recent papers have shown that overlapping properties seem to be present in bipartite networks and that it could explain better the properties observed in simple graphs. This work intends to investigate this question by studying two proposed metrics to account for overlapping structures in bipartite networks. The study, conducted on four dataset stemming from very different contexts (computer science, juridical science and social science), shows that the most popular metrics, the clustering coefficient, turns out to be less relevant that the recent redundancy coefficient to analyse intricate overlapping properties of real networks.

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