Monday, August 10, 2026 Strategy, technology, media, and social systems

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Sorin Adam Matei

Analysis, research, maps, and essays from Sorin Adam Matei.

Maps of random walks on complex networks reveal community structure

Fascinating paper on revealing community structure in networks… Similar to Newman’s work…

To comprehend the multipartite organization of large-scale biological and social systems, we introduce a new information theoretic approach that reveals community structure in weighted and directed networks. The method decomposes a network into modules by optimally compressing a description of information flows on the network. The result is a map that both simplifies and highlights the regularities in the structure and their relationships. We illustrate the method by making a map of scientific communication as captured in the citation patterns of more than 6000 journals. We discover a multicentric organization with fields that vary dramatically in size and degree of integration into the network of science. Along the backbone of the network — including physics, chemistry, molecular biology, and medicine — information flows bidirectionally, but the map reveals a directional pattern of citation from the applied fields to the basic sciences.

via [0707.0609] Maps of random walks on complex networks reveal community structure.

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