I'm trying to use WGCNA for weighted network analysis. I'm getting trouble how to decide this parameter. It's clear how to define and why this has been defined.

    #Choosing a soft-threshold to fit a scale-free topology to the network

    powers = c(c(1:10), seq(from = 12, to=20, by=2));

What is the meaning of this powers and how to decide this value? 
This parameter must be >1 and is simply the power to which the correlations are raised. This increases the contrast between high and low values, in effect a form of soft thresholding. In the [paper][1], the authors suggest setting it so that the resulting network has a scale-free topology. See the pickSoftThreshold() function in the [WGCNA R package][2].


  [1]: https://bmcbioinformatics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1471-2105-9-559
  [2]: https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=WGCNA