A Multi-Granularity Backbone Network Extraction Method Based on the Topology Potential

Inspired by the theory of physics field, in this paper, we propose a novel backbone network compression algorithm based on topology potential. With consideration of the network connectivity and backbone compression precision, the method is flexible and efficient according to various network characteristics. Meanwhile, we define a metric named compression ratio to evaluate the performance of backbone networks, which provides an optimal extraction granularity based on the contributions of degree number and topology connectivity. We apply our method to the public available Internet AS network and Hep-th network, which are the public datasets in the field of complex network analysis. Furthermore, we compare the obtained results with the metrics of precision ratio and recall ratio. All these results show that our algorithm is superior to the compared methods. Moreover, we investigate the characteristics in terms of degree distribution and self-similarity of the extracted backbone. It is proven that the compressed backbone network has a lot of similarity properties to the original network in terms of power-law exponent.