Quality functions in community detection

Santo Fortunato

doi:10.1117/12.726703

15 June 2007 Quality functions in community detection

Santo Fortunato

Proceedings Volume 6601, Noise and Stochastics in Complex Systems and Finance; 660108 (2007) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.726703
Event: SPIE Fourth International Symposium on Fluctuations and Noise, 2007, Florence, Italy

Abstract

Community structure represents the local organization of complex networks and the single most important feature to extract functional relationships between nodes. In the last years, the problem of community detection has been reformulated in terms of the optimization of a function, the Newman-Girvan modularity, that is supposed to express the quality of the partitions of a network into communities. Starting from a recent critical survey on modularity optimization, pointing out the existence of a resolution limit that poses severe limits to its applicability, we discuss the general issue of the use of quality functions in community detection. Our main conclusion is that quality functions are useful to compare partitions with the same number of modules, whereas the comparison of partitions with different numbers of modules is not straightforward and may lead to ambiguities.

Citation Download Citation

Santo Fortunato "Quality functions in community detection", Proc. SPIE 6601, Noise and Stochastics in Complex Systems and Finance, 660108 (15 June 2007); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.726703

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