Coarse-Graining Method Based on Hierarchical Clustering on Complex Networks

With the rapid development of big data, the scale of realistic networks is increasing continually. In order to reduce the network scale, some coarse-graining methods are proposed to transform large-scale networks into mesoscale networks. In this paper, a new coarse-graining method based on hierarchical clustering (HCCG) on complex networks is proposed. The network nodes are grouped by using the hierarchical clustering method, then updating the weights of edges between clusters extract the coarse-grained networks. A large number of simulation experiments on several typical complex networks show that the HCCG method can effectively reduce the network scale, meanwhile maintaining the synchronizability of the original network well. Furthermore, this method is more suitable for these networks with obvious clustering structure, and we can choose freely the size of the coarse-grained networks in the proposed method.