A comprehensive literature review on community detection: Approaches and applications

Abstract

Community detection has been designed as an axial field in Complex Network Analysis (CNA), since it allows to reveal cohesive and meaningful sub-graphs, recognize the features, functions, structure and dynamic of such complex networks. In this sense, various methods and approaches have been developed over the years to provide appropriate solutions to complex network paradigms, especially to community detection problems. Meanwhile, identifying communities in a given complex network is a big challenge for scientists, which needs a significant amount of literature and survey. In this paper, we detail literatures on community detection for complex networks, because of the need for researchers to perform reviews on the main papers related to identification of communities in complex networks, and in order to point out their principal strengths and limitations. We believe that this literature contribution can be a valuable source of information in particular for practitioners in the field of community detection, and do not include all existing contributions. Therefore, we have been interested in the value of the contribution of the selected approaches more than the chronological order of the publications.