The Difference Scales of Community Network Detection (Micro, Meso, and Macroscale)

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Community detection involves analyzing mesoscale structures which are neither micro scale nor macro scale. Communities are a specific type of mesoscale structure characterized by dense internal connections and sparse external connections. Other mesoscale structures include core periphery structures and role structures. While core periphery structures also have dense connections, they are connected to other things in a non-sparse manner. Role structures focus on identifying similarity in interaction patterns rather than literal density. Community structure is the most studied type of mesoscale structure, but advancements have been made in other types as well.

One way of looking at the world reveals it as an interference pattern of dynamic, ever-changing links — relationships that grow and break in nested groups of multilayer networks. Identity can be defined by informational exchange between one cluster of relationships and any other. A kind of music starts to make itself apparent in the avalanche of data and new analytical approaches that a century of innovation has availed us. But just as with new music genres, it requires a trained ear to attune to unfamiliar order…what can we learn from network science and related general, abstract mathematical approaches to discovering this order in a flood of numbers?

Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and in every episode we bring you with us for far-ranging conversations with our worldwide network of rigorous researchers developing new frameworks to explain the deepest mysteries of the universe.

This week we speak with SFI External Professor, UCLA mathematician Mason Porter (UCLA Website, Twitter, Google Scholar, Wikipedia), about his research on community detection in networks and the topology of data — going deep into a varied toolkit of approaches that help scientists disclose deep structures in the massive data-sets produced by modern life.

If you value our research and communication efforts, please subscribe, rate and review us at Apple Podcasts or Spotify, and consider making a donation — or finding other ways to engage with us — at santafe.edu/engage.

I know it comes as a surprise, but this is our penultimate episode. Please stay tuned for one more show in May when SFI President David Krakauer and I will reflect on major themes and highlights from the last three-and-a-half years, and look forward to what I’ll be doing next! It’s been an honor and a pleasure to bring complex systems science to you in this way, and hope we stay in touch. I won’t be hard to find.

Thank you for listening.

Podcast theme music by Mitch Mignano.

Mentioned & Related Media:

Bounded Confidence Models of Opinion Dynamics on Networks
SFI Seminar by Mason Porter (live Twitter coverage & YouTube stream recording)

Communities in Networks
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Social Structure of Facebook Networks
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by Aaron Clauset, Cristopher Moore, M.E.J. Newman

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