Cliques and a new measure of clustering: with application to U.S. domestic airlines

Abstract

We propose a higher-order generalization of the well-known overall clustering coefficient for triples $C(3)$ to any number of nodes. We give analytic formulae for the special cases of three, four, and five nodes and show that they have very fast runtime performance for small graphs. We discuss some theoretical properties and limitations of the new measure, and use it to provide insight into dynamic changes in the structure of U.S. airline networks.