Truncation of power law behavior in "scale-free" network models due to information filtering.

Mossa, S, Barthelemy, M, Stanley, HE, Amaral, LAN.
Phys. Rev. Lett. 88, art. no. 138701 (2002)

Times cited: 71

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Abstract

We formulate a general model for the growth of scale-free networks under filtering information conditions-that is, when the nodes can process information about only a subset of the existing nodes in the network. We find that the distribution of the number of incoming links to a node follows a universal scaling form, i.e., that it decays as a power law with an exponential truncation controlled not only by the system size but also by a feature not previously considered, the subset of the network "accessible" to the node. We test our model with empirical data for the World Wide Web and find agreement.