Alternative approach to community detection in networks

Abstract

The problem of community detection is relevant in many disciplines of science and modularity optimization is the widely accepted method for this purpose. It has recently been shown that this approach presents a resolution limit by which it is not possible to detect communities with sizes smaller than a threshold, which depends on the network size. Moreover, it might happen that the communities resulting from such an approach do not satisfy the usual qualitative definition of commune; i.e., nodes in a commune are more connected among themselves than to nodes outside the commune. In this paper we present a different method for community detection in complex networks. We define merit factors based on the weak and strong community definitions formulated by Radicchi [Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 101, 2658 (2004)] and we show that these local definitions avoid the resolution limit problem found in the modularity optimization approach. © 2009 The American Physical Society.