Edge intensity-based community measurement in complex networks

Publication date: Available online 18 January 2019Source: Physics Letters AAuthor(s): Hao LongAbstractCommunity is the dominant structure of complex networks. In recent years, community detection has become a heavily researched issue in network science, and many algorithms have been proposed to solve it. However, how to evaluate these algorithms and measure the strength of community structures is still an open problem. The modularity, as well as many of its variants, is widely used for this purpose, and maximizing such metrics is also a main approach to uncover communities, but this technique has a resolution limit problem in some cases, which means larger structures are favored over smaller ones. In this paper, we define the edge intensity to measure local density of network and propose an intensity-based measurement to support community evaluation; with an additional constraint the proposed measurement would also support multiresolution investigation of the networks. Experimental results on synthetic and real networks illustrate that the maximization of the new metric further reduces the resolution limit problem, and the maximization of the restricted intensity-based measurement provides multiresolution details of the investigated networks.

Source: Physics Letters A - January 20, 2019 Category: Physics Source Type: research