Today I read a paper titled “Rich-club connectivity dominates assortativity and transitivity of complex networks”
The abstract is:
Rich-club, assortativity and clustering coefficients are frequently-used measures to estimate topological properties of complex networks
Here we find that the connectivity among a very small portion of the richest nodes can dominate the assortativity and clustering coefficients of a large network, which reveals that the rich-club connectivity is leveraged throughout the network
Our study suggests that more attention should be payed to the organization pattern of rich nodes, for the structure of a complex system as a whole is determined by the associations between the most influential individuals
Moreover, by manipulating the connectivity pattern in a very small rich-club, it is sufficient to produce a network with desired assortativity or transitivity
Conversely, our findings offer a simple explanation for the observed assortativity and transitivity in many real world networks — such biases can be explained by the connectivities among the richest nodes