Community Detection Using Moore-Shannon Network Reliability: Application to Food Networks

Ritwick Mishra, Stephen G. Eubank, Madhurima Nath, Manu Amundsen, Abhijin Adiga

Abstract: Community detection in networks is extensively studied from a structural perspective, but very few works characterize communities with respect to dynamics on networks. We propose a generic framework based on Moore-Shannon network reliability for defining and discovering communities with respect to a variety of dynamical processes. This approach extracts communities in directed edge-weighted networks which satisfy strong connectivity properties as well as strong mutual influence between pairs of nodes through the dynamical process. We apply this framework to food networks. We compare our results with modularity-based approach, and analyze community structure across commodities, evolution over time, and with regard to dynamical system properties.