Identifying Communities with Modularity Metric Using Louvain and Leiden Algorithms

Abstract

Over the past 20 years, there has been a significant increase in publication in complex network analysis research, especially in community detection. Many methods were proposed to identify community structure. Each community identification algorithm has strengths and weaknesses due to the complexity of information. Among them, the optimisation methods are widely focused on. This paper focuses on an empirical study of two community detection algorithms based on agglomerative techniques using modularity metric: Louvain and Leiden. In this regard, the Louvain algorithm has been shown to produce a bad connection in the community and disconnected when executed iteratively. Therefore, the Leiden algorithm is designed to successively resolve the weaknesses. Performance comparisons between the two and their concept were summarised in detail, as well as the step-by-step learning process of the state-of-the-art algorithms. This study is important and beneficial to the future study of interdisciplinary data sciences of network analysis. First, it demonstrates that the Leiden method outperformed the Louvain algorithm in terms of modularity metric and running time. Second, the paper displays the use of these two algorithms on synthetic and real networks. The experiment was successful as it identified better performance, and future work is required to confirm and validate these findings.