Extraction of conjugate main-stream structures from a complex network flow

Abstract

We introduce a method to extract main-stream structures for a given complex network flow by trimming less effective links. As the resulting main streams generally have an almost loopless treelike structure, we can define the stream basin size for each node, which characterizes the importance of the node with regard to the flow. As a real-world example, we apply this method to an interfirm trading network, both for the money flow and its conjugate - the material or service flow - confirming that both basin size distributions follow a similar power law that differs significantly from the basin size distributions of rivers in nature. We theoretically analyze the process of trimming and derive a consistent statistical formulation between the original link number and the basin size.