Section: Application Domains

Algorithms for Finding Communities

In the study of complex networks, a network is said to have community structure if the nodes of the network can be easily grouped into (potentially overlapping) sets of nodes such that each set of nodes is densely connected internally. Community structures are quite common in real networks. Social networks include community groups (the origin of the term, in fact) based on common location, interests, occupation, etc. Metabolic networks have communities based on functional groupings. Citation networks form communities by research topic. Being able to identify these sub-structures within a network can provide insight into how network function and topology affect each other. We propose several algorithms for this problem and extensions [50], [58], [32], [59]