Fast extraction of the backbone of projected bipartite networks to aid community detection

Abstract

This paper introduces a computationally inexpensive method of extracting the\nbackbone of one-mode networks projected from bipartite networks. We show that\nthe edge weights in the one-mode projections are distributed according to a\nPoisson binomial distribution and that finding the expected weight distribution\nof a one-mode network projected from a random bipartite network only requires\nknowledge of the bipartite degree distributions. Being able to extract the\nbackbone of a projection is highly beneficial in filtering out redundant\ninformation in large complex networks and narrowing down the information in the\none-mode projection to the most relevant. We demonstrate that the backbone of a\none-mode projection aids in the detection of communities.\n