Community detection in networks

Abstract

The problem of community detection is relevant in many disciplines of science. A community is usually defined, in a qualitative way, as a subset of nodes of a network which are more connected among themselves than to the rest of the network. In this article, we introduce a new method for community detection in complex networks. We define new merit factors based on the weak and strong community definitions formulated by Radicchi et al. [2004] and we show that this local definition properly describes the communities observed experimentally in two typical social networks. © 2010 World Scientific Publishing Company.