A Note on Community Trees in Networks

Abstract

We introduce the concept of community trees that summarizes topological structures within a network. A community tree is a tree structure representing clique communities from the clique percolation method (CPM). The community tree also generates a persistent diagram. Community trees and persistent diagrams reveal topological structures of the underlying networks and can be used as visualization tools. We study the stability of community trees and derive a quantity called the total star number (TSN) that presents an upper bound on the change of community trees. Our findings provide a topological interpretation for the stability of communities generated by the CPM.