Dissemin is shutting down on January 1st, 2025

Published in

American Physical Society, Physical review E: Statistical, nonlinear, and soft matter physics, 1(84)

DOI: 10.1103/physreve.84.016114

Links

Tools

Export citation

Search in Google Scholar

Narrow scope for resolution-limit-free community detection

Journal article published in 2011 by V. A. Traag ORCID, P. Van Dooren, Y. Nesterov
This paper is available in a repository.
This paper is available in a repository.

Full text: Download

Green circle
Preprint: archiving allowed
Green circle
Postprint: archiving allowed
Green circle
Published version: archiving allowed
Data provided by SHERPA/RoMEO

Abstract

Detecting communities in large networks has drawn much attention over the years. While modularity remains one of the more popular methods of community detection, the so-called resolution limit remains a significant drawback. To overcome this issue, it was recently suggested that instead of comparing the network to a random null model, as is done in modularity, it should be compared to a constant factor. However, it is unclear what is meant exactly by "resolution-limit-free", that is, not suffering from the resolution limit. Furthermore, the question remains what other methods could be classified as resolution-limit-free. In this paper we suggest a rigorous definition and derive some basic properties of resolution-limit-free methods. More importantly, we are able to prove exactly which class of community detection methods are resolution-limit-free. Furthermore, we analyze which methods are not resolution-limit-free, suggesting there is only a limited scope for resolution-limit-free community detection methods. Finally, we provide such a natural formulation, and show it performs superbly.