Professor Zheng Muhua from the College of Physics and Electrical Engineering at our university, along with collaborators, has published the latest research findings titled "Geometric renormalization of weighted networks" in the internationally renowned physics journal Communications Physics (7 (1), 97 (2024)), which is part of the Nature portfolio. This work is a result of collaboration between Professor Zheng Muhua, Dr. Guillermo García Pérez from Finland, and Professors Marián Boguñá and M. Ángeles Serrano from the University of Barcelona, Spain. Professor Zheng Muhua is the first author of the paper, and Jiangsu University is the primary affiliation of the first author.

Professor Zheng Muhua and his collaborators have proposed a method for compressing ultra-large weighted networks (geometric renormalization of weighted networks). This method effectively compresses the original large network by retaining only the maximum edge weight between sub-nodes during the node merging process. In real-world network data, the smaller networks generated by this method can well preserve the properties of the original network, such as degree distribution, clustering coefficient, degree correlation, weight distribution, and strength distribution. This achievement has numerous practical applications, including generating multi-scale small networks that closely match real data, reconstructing complex networks, accelerating dynamic simulations and modeling, and analyzing phase transitions and critical behaviors under finite-size effects.

This work was supported by several projects, including the National Natural Science Foundation of China's Youth Fund, the Jiangsu Distinguished Professor Talent Program, the Jiangsu Provincial Youth Fund, and the Jiangsu University High-Level Talent Start-up Fund.

(College of Physics and Electrical Engineering)

Link to the paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s42005-024-01589-7#Ack1