Behind the communities, a focus on the sparse part of a network

Abstract

We propose a method that allows to detect the subset of the sparse nodes in a complex network, providing supplementary informations about its structure and features. The aim is to produce a complementary approach to the classical ones dealing with dense communities, and in the end to develop mixed models of community classification which are articulated around the network’s sparse skeleton. We will present in this article different metrics that measure sparsity in a network, and introduce a method that uses these metrics to extract the sparse part from it, which we tested on a toy network and on data coming from the real world.