Community detection using coordination games

Abstract

Communities typically capture homophily as people of the same community share many common features. This paper is motivated by the problem of community detection in social networks, as it can help improve our understanding of the network topology and the spread of information. Given the selfish nature of humans to align with like-minded people, we employ game-theoretic models and algorithms to detect communities in this paper. Specifically, we employ coordination games to represent interactions between individuals in a social network. We represent the problem of community detection as a graph coordination game. We provide a novel and scalable two-phased probabilistic semi-supervised approach to compute an accurate overlapping community structure in the given network. We evaluate our algorithm against the best existing methods for community detection and show that our algorithm improves significantly on benchmark networks (real and synthetic) with respect to standard normalized mutual information measure.