In most networks, there are elements that have a huge amount of direct connections to others, and these individuals tend to be rather important. They are called super-spreaders or hubs.
We can represent the interactions between the neurons in the body-clock as a network. In our case the network has two communities, where each community has many edges between the nodes, while there are only few edges between the nodes in different communities.
A complete overview of interbank exchanges would help prevent a new financial collapse. However, banks do not provide this information: this is why a “network reconstruction” methodology to infer the unobserved connections is needed.
During the Corona pandemic the reproduction number appeared in much of the media. While it is not at all obvious what this quantity measures exactly, it is obvious that making it smaller than 1 really is crucial in controlling the spread of the virus. So what is this really?
In 2016 a company calculated that the average number of followers in Twitter was about 707. Although this might already sound like a lot, it pales in comparison with the top Twitter users. There are currently more than 100 users that have more than ten million followers. Some, like Barack Obama or Katy Perry, even have more than one hundred million followers, which is roughly 140.000 times larger than the average.
Many networks, from technological to social networks, and from the world-wide web to collaboration networks, have a hub-like structure. Why is this the case, and why are they not much more homogeneous?