Quantification and comparison of degree distributions in complex networks

The degree distribution is an important characteristic in complex networks. In many applications, quantification of degree distribution in the form of a fixed-length feature vector is a necessary step. Additionally, we often need to compare the degree distribution of two given networks and extract the amount of similarity between the two distributions. In this paper, we propose a novel method for quantification of the degree distributions in complex networks. Based on this quantification method, a new distance function is also proposed for degree distributions, which captures the differences in the overall structure of the two given distributions. The proposed method is able to effectively compare networks even with different scales, and outperforms the state of the art methods considerably, with respect to the accuracy of the distance function. The datasets and more detailed evaluations are available upon request.