Factors Determining Nestedness in Complex Networks

Samuel Jonhson, Virginia Domínguez-García and Miguel A Muñoz

PLOS ONE, 2013, vol. 8, issue 9, 1-7

Abstract: Understanding the causes and effects of network structural features is a key task in deciphering complex systems. In this context, the property of network nestedness has aroused a fair amount of interest as regards ecological networks. Indeed, Bastolla et al. introduced a simple measure of network nestedness which opened the door to analytical understanding, allowing them to conclude that biodiversity is strongly enhanced in highly nested mutualistic networks. Here, we suggest a slightly refined version of such a measure of nestedness and study how it is influenced by the most basic structural properties of networks, such as degree distribution and degree-degree correlations (i.e. assortativity). We find that most of the empirically found nestedness stems from heterogeneity in the degree distribution. Once such an influence has been discounted – as a second factor – we find that nestedness is strongly correlated with disassortativity and hence – as random networks have been recently found to be naturally disassortative – they also tend to be naturally nested just as the result of chance.

Date: 2013
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0074025 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 74025&type=printable (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0074025

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0074025

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone (plosone@plos.org).