Extracting Backbones from Weighted Complex Networks with Incomplete Information

The backbone is the natural abstraction of a complex network, which can help people understand a networked system in a more simplified form. Traditional backbone extraction methods tend to include many outliers into the backbone. What is more, they often suffer from the computational inefficiency—the exhaustive search of all nodes or edges is often prohibitively expensive. In this paper, we propose a backbone extraction heuristic with incomplete information (BEHwII) to find the backbone in a complex weighted network. First, a strict filtering rule is carefully designed to determine edges to be preserved or discarded. Second, we present a local search model to examine part of edges in an iterative way, which only relies on the local/incomplete knowledge rather than the global view of the network. Experimental results on four real‐life networks demonstrate the advantage of BEHwII over the classic disparity filter method by either effectiveness or efficiency validity.