Origins of fractality in the growth of complex networks

By Chaoming Song, Shlomo Havlin, Hernán A. Makse. 2005

571 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Complex networks from such different fields as biology, technology or sociology share similar organization principles. The possibility of a unique growth mechanism promises to uncover universal origins of collective behaviour. In particular, the emergence of self-similarity in complex networks raises the fundamental question of the growth process according to which these structures evolve. Here we investigate the concept of renormalization as a mechanism for the growth of fractal and non-fractal modular networks. We show that the key principle that gives rise to the fractal architecture of networks is a strong effective ‘repulsion’ (or, disassortativity) between the most connected nodes (that is, the hubs) on all length scales, rendering them very dispersed. More importantly, we show that a robust network comprising functional modules, such as a cellular network, necessitates a fractal topology, suggestive of an evolutionary drive for their existence.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c6f1a3fec35503a488b43007bb12106a18f79e54

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In Economics and Econometrics

  1. Norbert Marwan
  2. Jürgen Kurths
  3. Sebastian Weber
  4. Yong Zou
  5. Reik V. Donner
  6. Jonathan F. Donges
  7. Wei‐Xing Zhou
  8. W. Yuan

In Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

  1. Jürgen Kurths
  2. Norbert Marwan
  3. Yong Zou
  4. Reik V. Donner
  5. Jonathan F. Donges
  6. M. A. Porter
  7. Sebastian Weber
  8. Renaud Lambiotte

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