Discovering Functional Communities in Dynamical Networks

Many networks are important because they are substrates for dynamical systems, and their pattern of functional connectivity can itself be dynamic -- they can functionally reorganize, even if their underlying "anatomical" structure remains fixed. However, the recent rapid progress in discovering the community structure of networks has overwhelmingly focused on that constant anatomical connectivity. In this talk, I will lay out the problem of discovering functional communities, and describe an approach to doing so. This method combines recent work on measuring information sharing across stochastic networks with an existing and successful community-discovery algorithm for weighted networks. I illustrate it with applications to both simulated and real networks. (Joint work with Marcelo Camperi and Kristina Klinkner.)