  Specific choices about how to represent complex networks can have a
substantial effect on the execution time required for the respective
construction and analysis of those structures. In this work we report a
comparison of the effects of representing complex networks statically as
matrices or dynamically as spase structures. Three theoretical models of
complex networks are considered: two types of Erdos-Renyi as well as the
Barabasi-Albert model. We investigated the effect of the different
representations with respect to the construction and measurement of several
topological properties (i.e. degree, clustering coefficient, shortest path
length, and betweenness centrality). We found that different forms of
representation generally have a substantial effect on the execution time, with
the sparse representation frequently resulting in remarkably superior
performance.
