Community detection in hypergraphs through hyperedge percolation

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Kovács, Bianka, Benedek, Barnabás, Palla, Gergely
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Kovács, Bianka
Benedek, Barnabás
Palla, Gergely
author_facet Kovács, Bianka
Benedek, Barnabás
Palla, Gergely
contents Complex networks often exhibit community structure, with communities corresponding to denser subgraphs in which nodes are closely linked. When modelling systems where interactions extend beyond node pairs to arbitrary numbers of nodes, hypergraphs become necessary, creating a need for specialised community detection methods. Here, we adapt the classical $k$-clique percolation method to hypergraphs, constructing communities from hyperedges containing at least $k$ nodes, defining hyperedge adjacency similarly to clique adjacency. Although the analogy between the proposed hyperedge percolation method and the classical clique percolation algorithm is evident, we show that communities obtained directly from the hyperedges can differ from those identified via clique percolation on the pairwise projection of the hypergraph. We also propose an alternative way for merging hyperedges into communities, where instead of imposing a lower bound on hyperedge cardinality, we restrict the maximum size of the considered hyperedges. This alternative algorithm better suits hypergraphs where larger hyperedges realise weaker linkages between the nodes. After comparing the suggested two approaches on simple synthetic hypergraphs designed to highlight their distinctions, we test them on hypergraphs generated by a newly proposed geometric process on the hyperbolic plane, as well as on some real-world examples.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_15213
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Community detection in hypergraphs through hyperedge percolation
Kovács, Bianka
Benedek, Barnabás
Palla, Gergely
Physics and Society
Complex networks often exhibit community structure, with communities corresponding to denser subgraphs in which nodes are closely linked. When modelling systems where interactions extend beyond node pairs to arbitrary numbers of nodes, hypergraphs become necessary, creating a need for specialised community detection methods. Here, we adapt the classical $k$-clique percolation method to hypergraphs, constructing communities from hyperedges containing at least $k$ nodes, defining hyperedge adjacency similarly to clique adjacency. Although the analogy between the proposed hyperedge percolation method and the classical clique percolation algorithm is evident, we show that communities obtained directly from the hyperedges can differ from those identified via clique percolation on the pairwise projection of the hypergraph. We also propose an alternative way for merging hyperedges into communities, where instead of imposing a lower bound on hyperedge cardinality, we restrict the maximum size of the considered hyperedges. This alternative algorithm better suits hypergraphs where larger hyperedges realise weaker linkages between the nodes. After comparing the suggested two approaches on simple synthetic hypergraphs designed to highlight their distinctions, we test them on hypergraphs generated by a newly proposed geometric process on the hyperbolic plane, as well as on some real-world examples.
title Community detection in hypergraphs through hyperedge percolation
topic Physics and Society
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.15213