Community detection in networks: Structural communities versus ground truth

Darko Hric, Richard K. Darst, and Santo Fortunato
Phys. Rev. E 90, 062805 – Published 9 December 2014

Abstract

Algorithms to find communities in networks rely just on structural information and search for cohesive subsets of nodes. On the other hand, most scholars implicitly or explicitly assume that structural communities represent groups of nodes with similar (nontopological) properties or functions. This hypothesis could not be verified, so far, because of the lack of network datasets with information on the classification of the nodes. We show that traditional community detection methods fail to find the metadata groups in many large networks. Our results show that there is a marked separation between structural communities and metadata groups, in line with recent findings. That means that either our current modeling of community structure has to be substantially modified, or that metadata groups may not be recoverable from topology alone.

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  • Received 2 June 2014
  • Revised 5 September 2014

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.90.062805

©2014 American Physical Society

Authors & Affiliations

Darko Hric, Richard K. Darst, and Santo Fortunato

  • Department of Biomedical Engineering and Computational Science, Aalto University School of Science, P.O. Box 12200, FI-00076, Finland

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Issue

Vol. 90, Iss. 6 — December 2014

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