Some insights into the relevance of nodes’ characteristics in complex network structures

Network structures describe a variety of systems and it is crucial to recognise essential functionalities that affect the dynamic of interactions. Nodes are often identified by certain characteristics, such as age or gender, and the tendency to link nodes with similar features is referred to as homophily. To verify which characteristic is able to address such behaviour has a computational complexity that becomes hard for large networks. In this paper we present a methodology that can be used as a pre-processing tool in order to avoid the study of non-effective nodes’ characteristics.