The interplay between network transitivity and community structure

Abstract

Recent empirical observations suggest that network transitivity is highly correlated with community structure in many real-world networks. In this paper, we theoretically investigate this relationship by deriving the limits of the global and average clustering coefficients for the geometric block model (GBM). Both limits exhibit a phase transition; specifically, the functional forms of the limit functions differ between the weak and strong community structure strength regimes. For a GBM with balanced communities, the limits of the global and average clustering coefficients are identical, whereas these limits differ for unbalanced communities. In general, the clustering coefficients do not exhibit a monotonic relationship with community structure strength. Particularly, for a balanced GBM where the within-community edge probability is a constant multiple of the between-community edge probability, the limit decreases from $3/4$ to $3/5$ and subsequently increases toward an asymptotic upper bound of $3/4$ as the multiple grows from one. A similar pattern is observed for the global clustering coefficient in unbalanced settings, where both limits exhibit an explicit dependence on community size.