Empirical analysis of dependence between stations in Chinese railway network

A railway transportation system can be represented by a bipartite network consisting of trains and stations, where a train is connected to all stations where it stops. In this paper, motivated by the resource-allocation process taking place on networks, we design a method to project a Chinese train-station bipartite network into a weighted station network. A new metric is proposed to quantify the dependence between pairs of stations, which is shown to follow a shifted power-law distribution. In addition, we compare the resource-allocation method and the well-known multiple-edge method, and the results indicate that our proposed method is more reasonable.