Communities, modules and large-scale structure in networks

Networks, also called graphs by mathematicians, provide a useful abstraction of the structure of many complex systems, ranging from social systems and computer networks to biological networks and the state spaces of physical systems. In the past decade there have been significant advances in experiments to determine the topological structure of networked systems, but there remain substantial challenges in extracting scientific understanding from the large quantities of data produced by the experiments. A variety of basic measures and metrics are available that can tell us about small-scale structure in networks, such as correlations, connections and recurrent patterns, but it is considerably more difficult to quantify structure on medium and large scales, to understand the 'big picture'. Important progress has been made, however, within the past few years, a selection of which is reviewed here.