  Community structure in networks is often a consequence of homophily, or
assortative mixing, based on some attribute of the vertices. For example,
researchers may be grouped into communities corresponding to their research
topic. This is possible if vertex attributes have discrete values, but many
networks exhibit assortative mixing by some continuous-valued attribute, such
as age or geographical location. In such cases, no discrete communities can be
identified. We consider how the notion of community structure can be
generalized to networks that are based on continuous-valued attributes: in
general, a network may contain discrete communities which are ordered according
to their attribute values. We propose a method of generating synthetic ordered
networks and investigate the effect of ordered community structure on the
spread of infectious diseases. We also show that community detection algorithms
fail to recover community structure in ordered networks, and evaluate an
alternative method using a layout algorithm to recover the ordering.
