Spectral Perturbation and Reconstructability of Complex Networks

In recent years, many network perturbation techniques, such as topological perturbations and service perturbations, were employed to study and improve the robustness of complex networks. However, there is no general way to evaluate the network robustness. In this paper, we propose a global measure for a network, the reconstructability coefficient theta , defined as the maximum number of eigenvalues that can be removed, subject to the condition that the adjacency matrix can be reconstructed exactly. Our main finding is that a linear scaling law, E[theta]=aN, seems universal in that it holds for all networks that we have studied.