“…With the proposal of the small-world and scale-free network models, the traditional ER theoretical framework has been transcended and real-world statistics has been characterized more effectively (Fang et al 2007). Subsequently, network science has been applied in many fields, such as sociology (Porat, Benguigui 2016), biology and medicine (Wang et al 2016;Huang et al 2017), physics (Sui et al 2016), information dissemination (Carley et al 2016;Park et al 2016), interdisciplinary knowledge exchange (Shan et al 2014), technology integration (Lee et al 2014), and art design (Jiang 2016). Almost at the same time, the application of complex network analysis were introduced into financial markets (Mantegna 1999) and has been widely applied to many fields as macroeconomic indices (Gao et al 2013), business cycles (Caraiani 2013), stock markets (Hwang et al 2016;Brida et al 2016;Coletti 2016;Majapa, Gossel 2016;Qiao et al 2016), foreign exchange (Naylor et al 2007;Brida, Risso 2010) and financial market risk (Huang et al 2016).…”