Structure of higher-order interactions in social-ecological networks through Q-analysis of their neighbourhood and clique complex

Abstract

This paper studies higher-order interactions in social-ecological networks, which formally represent interactions within the social and ecological units of an ecosystem. Many real-world social ecosystems exhibit not only pairwise interactions but also higher-order interactions among their units. Therefore, the conventional graph-theoretic description of networks falls short of capturing these higher-order interactions due to the inherent limitations of the graph definition. In this work, a mathematical framework for capturing the higher-order interactions of a social-ecological system has been given by incorporating notions from combinatorial algebraic topology. In order to achieve this, two different simplicial complexes, the clique and the neighbourhood complex, have been constructed from a pairwise social-ecological network. As a case study, the Q-analysis and a structural study of the interactions in the rural agricultural system of southern Madagascar have been done at various structural levels denoted by q. The results obtained by calculating all the structural vectors for both simplicial complexes, along with exciting results about the participation of facets of the clique complex at different q-levels, have been discussed. This work also establishes significant theorems concerning the dimension of the neighbourhood complex and clique complex obtained from the parent pairwise network.