The landscape of complex networks -- critical nodes and a hierarchical decomposition (Q2511253)

The idea of this paper is to take ideas from Morse theory and apply them to networks in order to obtain some kind of hierarchical decomposition for networks. The authors refer to the resulting theory as a \textit{landscape} for functions on networks. Nodes in the network can be classified so as to allow defining critical nodes of index \(0\) and \(1\). Those of index \(0\) correspond to basins of attraction and those of index \(1\) to saddles between the basins of attraction. The ideas are illustrated with examples form social networks, where the basins of attraction are interpreted as differing communities, and from protein binding networks