← Back to Physics and Society
physics.soc-ph

How to strip hypergraphs down to their skeleton

Alec Kirkley, Helcio Felippe, Federico Malizia, Federico Battiston

May 30, 2026

Hypergraphs—networks where multiple entities connect at once, not just in pairs—are messy and redundant. This team developed an information-theoretic algorithm to prune away nested and redundant links, leaving a minimal "backbone" that preserves the network's core behavior. Tests on synthetic and real datasets (from biology, social systems) show dramatic sparsification without losing structural information.
Published as Hypergraph backboning arXiv:2606.00893
Read the original paper →