Persistent Homology of Collaboration Networks

Over the past few decades, network science has introduced several statistical measures to determine the topological structure of large networks. Initially, the focus was on binary networks, where edges are either present or not. Thus, many of the earlier measures can only be applied to binary networks and not to weighted networks. More recently, it has been shown that weighted networks have a rich structure, and several generalized measures have been introduced. We use persistent homology, a recent technique from computational topology, to analyse four weighted collaboration networks. We include the first and second Betti numbers for the first time for this type of analysis. We show that persistent homology corresponds to tangible features of the networks. Furthermore, we use it to distinguish the collaboration networks from similar random networks.