Reconstruct the Hierarchical Structure in a Complex Network

A number of recent works have concentrated on a few statistical properties of complex networks, such as the clustering, the right-skewed degree distribution and the community, which are common to many real world networks. In this paper, we address the hierarchy property sharing among a large amount of networks. Based upon the eigenvector centrality (EC) measure, a method is proposed to reconstruct the hierarchical structure of a complex network. It is tested on the Santa Fe Institute collaboration network, whose structure is well known. We also apply it to a Mathematicians' collaboration network and the protein interaction network of Yeast. The method can detect significantly hierarchical structures in these networks.