Randomizing Hypergraphs Preserving Degree Correlation and Local Clustering

Abstract

Many complex systems involve direct interactions among more than two entities and can be represented by hypergraphs, in which hyperedges encode higher-order interactions among an arbitrary number of nodes. To analyze structures and dynamics of given hypergraphs, a solid practice is to compare them with those for randomized hypergraphs that preserve some specific properties of the original hypergraphs. In the present study, we propose a family of such reference models for hypergraphs, called the hyper dK-series, by extending the so-called dK-series for dyadic networks to the case of hypergraphs. The hyper dK-series preserves up to the individual node's degree, node's degree correlation, node's redundancy coefficient, and/or the hyperedge's size depending on the parameter values. Furthermore, we numerically find that higher-order hyper dK-series more accurately preserves the shortest path length and degree distribution of the one-mode projection of the original hypergraph, which the method does not intend to preserve. We also apply the hyper dK-series to numerical simulations of epidemic spreading and evolutionary game dynamics on empirical social hypergraphs. We find that the hyperedge's size affects these dynamics more than any of the node's properties and that the node's degree correlation and redundancy in the empirical hypergraphs promote cooperation.