3.4 Community detection.
We identified 5 trading communities with a modularity value of 0.338. A strong community structure is usually in the range of 0.3–0.7 (Newman and Girvan, 2004); a high proportion (92.29%) of intra-community movements and a lower proportion (7.71%) of intercommunity ones, represented as the few connecting lines between communities coloured in the circular plot (Table 4, Fig. 7B).
Table 4. Number of trade connections within and between trade communities in Ecuador (2017–2019).