Rapporto tecnico, 2012, ENG, 10.1002/sam.10133

A classification for community discovery methods in complex networks

Coscia M., Giannotti F., Pedreschi D.

Computer Science Department, University of Pisa, Italy - ISTI-CNR, Pisa, Italy - Center for Complex Network Research, Northeast University, Boston, USA; CNR-ISTI, Pisa, Italy; Department of Computer Science, Univ. Pisa;

Many real-world networks are intimately organized according to a community structure. Much research effort has been devoted to develop methods and algorithms that can efficiently highlight this hidden structure of a network, yielding a vast literature on what is called today community detection. Since network representation can be very complex and can contain different variants in the traditional graph model, each algorithm in the literature focuses on some of these properties and establishes, explicitly or implicitly, its own definition of community. According to this definition, each proposed algorithm then extracts the communities, which typically reflect only part of the features of real communities. The aim of this survey is to provide a 'user manual' for the community discovery problem. Given a meta definition of what a community in a social network is, our aim is to organize the main categories of community discovery methods based on the definition of community they adopt. Given a desired definition of community and the features of a problem (size of network, direction of edges,multidimensionality, and so on) this review paper is designed to provide a set of approaches that researchers could focus on. The proposed classification of community discovery methods is also useful for putting into perspective the many open directions for further research.

Keywords

Community discovery, Social network, Groups, complex network, Graph partitioning

CNR authors

Coscia Michele, Giannotti Fosca

CNR institutes

ISTI – Istituto di scienza e tecnologie dell'informazione "Alessandro Faedo"

ID: 213258

Year: 2012

Type: Rapporto tecnico

Creation: 2013-05-14 15:18:27.000

Last update: 2020-12-18 12:10:50.000

External links

OAI-PMH: Dublin Core

OAI-PMH: Mods

OAI-PMH: RDF

DOI: 10.1002/sam.10133

URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/1206.3552

External IDs

CNR OAI-PMH: oai:it.cnr:prodotti:213258

DOI: 10.1002/sam.10133