Extraction of Conjugate Main-stream Structures from a Complex Network Flow
Physical Review E
We introduce a method to extract main-stream structures for a given complex network flow by trimming less effective links. As the resulting main streams generally have an almost loopless treelike structure, we can define the stream basin size for each node, which characterizes the importance of the node with regard to the flow. As a real-world example, we apply this method to an inter-firm trading network, both for the money flow and its conjugate-the material or service flow-confirming that both basin size distributions follow a similar power law that differs significantly from the basin size distributions of rivers in nature. We theoretically analyze the process of trimming and derive a consistent statistical formulation between the original link number and the basin size.
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Tokyo Institute of Technology
Koutarou Tamura, Hideki Takayasu, and Misako Takayasu