Network dismantling with community-based edge percolation

Traditional node-based dismantling strategies, which remove nodes along with their associated edges, tend to incur high costs. In contrast, edge-based strategies are more cost-effective but often suffer from low efficiency due to the large number of edges in most networks. To address these challenges, we propose a divide-and-conquer framework that reinterprets network-level dismantling as cluster-level dismantling. Specifically, we integrate community detection with explosive percolation to develop the Community-based Edge Percolation (CEP) algorithm, which targets critical edges whose removal effectively breaks the network into subcritical components, thereby optimizing dismantling efficiency while minimizing costs. Experiments on 38 synthetic networks derived from four different models, as well as on nine empirical networks, show that CEP consistently outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) algorithms across nearly all datasets, yielding improvements of up to 30.611 % in fc and 67.108 % in Schneider R. Further analysis indicates that the sets of removed edges identified by CEP have a low correlation with those identified by other benchmarks, underlining its novelty and superior capability in identifying critical edges. Overall, we propose a universal and efficient edge dismantling framework that exhibits substantial advantages in large-scale empirical networks, offering valuable insights into network robustness.