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Walk-modularity and community structure in networks

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 July 2015

DAVID MEHRLE ,
AMY STROSSER  and
ANTHONY HARKIN
DAVID MEHRLE
Affiliation:
Department of Mathematics, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA (e-mail: dfm223@cornell.edu)
AMY STROSSER
Affiliation:
Department of Mathematics and Statistics, Villanova University, Villanova, PA, USA (e-mail: astrosse@villanova.edu)
ANTHONY HARKIN
Affiliation:
School of Mathematical Sciences, Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, NY, USA (e-mail: harkin@rit.edu)
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Abstract

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Modularity maximization has been one of the most widely used approaches in the last decade for discovering community structure in networks of practical interest in biology, computing, social science, statistical mechanics, and more. Modularity is a quality function that measures the difference between the number of edges found within clusters minus the number of edges one would statistically expect to find based on some equivalent random graph model. We explore a natural generalization of modularity based on the difference between the actual and expected number of walks within clusters, which we refer to as walk-modularity. Walk-modularity can be expressed in matrix form, and community detection can be performed by finding the leading eigenvector of the walk-modularity matrix. We demonstrate community detection on both synthetic and real-world networks and find that walk-modularity maximization returns significantly improved results compared to traditional modularity maximization.

Keywords

community detectionmodularity

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Network Science , Volume 3 , Issue 3 , September 2015 , pp. 348 - 360
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

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