Detecting Groups in Directed and Non-Directed Bipartite Networks

Abstract

Bipartite networks provide an effective resource for representing, characterizing, and modeling several abstract and real-world systems and structures involving binary relations, which include food webs, social interactions, and customer-product relationships. Of particular interest is the problem of, given a specific bipartite network, to identify possible respective groups or clusters characterized by similar interconnecting patterns. The present work approaches this issue by extending and complementing a previously described coincidence similarity methodology (Bioarxiv, doi.org/10.1101/2022.07.16.500294) in several manners, including the consideration of direct and non-directed bipartite networks, the characterization of groups in those networks, as well as considering synthetic bipartite networks presenting groups as a resource for studying the performance of the described methodology. Several interesting results are described and discussed, including the corroboration of the potential of the coincidence similarity methodology for achieving enhanced separation between the groups in bipartite networks.