Alternative approach to community detection in networks

A.D.MEDUS; C.O. DORSO

PHYSICAL REVIEW E - STATISTICAL PHYSICS, PLASMAS, FLUIDS AND RELATED INTERDISCIPLINARY TOPICS

APS

Lugar: New York; Año: 2009 vol. 79 p. 66111 - 66111

1063-651X

problem of community detection is relevant in many disciplines of science and modularity optimizationis the widely accepted method for this purpose. It has recently been shown that this approach presents aresolution limit by which it is not possible to detect communities with sizes smaller than a threshold, whichdepends on the network size. Moreover, it might happen that the communities resulting from such an approachdo not satisfy the usual qualitative definition of commune; i.e., nodes in a commune are more connected amongthemselves than to nodes outside the commune. In this paper we present a different method for communitydetection in complex networks. We define merit factors based on the weak and strong community definitionsformulated by Radicchi et al. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 101, 2658
2004 and we show that these localdefinitions avoid the resolution limit problem found in the modularity optimization approach.