Matthieu Latapy, Clémence Magnien and Nathalie Del Vecchio
Social Networks (2008), vol. 30, no1, pp. 31-48
Many large real-world networks actually have a 2-mode nature: their nodes may be separated into two classes, the links being between nodes of different classes only. Despite this, and despite the fact that many ad-hoc tools have been designed for the study of special cases, very few exist to analyse (describe, extract relevant information) such networks in a systematic way. We propose here an extension of the most basic notions used nowadays to analyse large 1-mode networks (the classical case) to the 2-mode case. To achieve this, we introduce a set of simple statistics, which we discuss by comparing their values on a representative set of real-world networks and on their random versions. This makes it possible to evaluate their relevance in capturing properties of interest in 2-mode networks.