Extracting backbones from weighted complex networks with incomplete information

Abstract

The backbone is the natural abstraction of a complex network, which can help people understand a networked system in a more simplified form. Traditional backbone extraction methods tend to include many outliers into the backbone. What is more, they often suffer from the computational inefficiency - the exhaustive search of all nodes or edges is often prohibitively expensive. In this paper, we propose a backbone extraction heuristic with incomplete information (BEHwII) to find the backbone in a complex weighted network. First, a strict filtering rule is carefully designed to determine edges to be preserved or discarded. Second, we present a local search model to examine part of edges in an iterative way, which only relies on the local/incomplete knowledge rather than the global view of the network. Experimental results on four real-life networks demonstrate the advantage of BEHwII over the classic disparity filter method by either effectiveness or efficiency validity.