Beyond the locally treelike approximation for percolation on real networks

Abstract

Theoretical attempts proposed so far to describe ordinary percolation processes on real-world networks rely on the locally treelike ansatz. Such an approximation, however, holds only to a limited extent, because real graphs are often characterized by high frequencies of short loops. We present here a theoretical framework able to overcome such a limitation for the case of site percolation. Our method is based on a message passing algorithm that discounts redundant paths along triangles in the graph. We systematically test the approach on 98 real-world graphs and on synthetic networks. We find excellent accuracy in the prediction of the whole percolation diagram, with significant improvement with respect to the prediction obtained under the locally treelike approximation. Residual discrepancies between theory and simulations do not depend on clustering and can be attributed to the presence of loops longer than three edges. We present also a method to account for clustering in bond percolation, but the improvement with respect to the method based on the treelike approximation is much less apparent.