Self-similarity of complex networks under centrality-based node removal strategy

Real-world networks exhibit complex topological interactions that pose a significant computational challenge to analyses of such networks.Due to limited resources,there is an urgent need to develop dimensionality reduction techniques that can significantly reduce the structural complexity of initial large-scale networks.In this paper,we propose a subgraph extraction method based on the node centrality measure to reduce the size of the initial network topology.Specifically,nodes with smaller centrality value are removed from the initial network to obtain a subgraph with a smaller size.Our results demonstrate that various real-world networks,including power grids,technology,transportation,biology,social,and language networks,exhibit self-similarity behavior during the reduction process.The present results reveal the selfsimilarity and scale invariance of real-world networks from a different perspective and also provide an effective guide for simplifying the topology of large-scale networks.