New contributions for the comparison of community detection algorithms in attributed networks

Abstract

AbstractCommunity detection techniques use only the information about the network topology to find communities in networks. Similarly, classic clustering techniques for vector data consider only the information about the values of the attributes describing the objects to find clusters. In real-world networks, however, in addition to the information about the network topology, usually there is information about the attributes describing the vertices that can also be used to find communities. Using both the information about the network topology and about the attributes describing the vertices can improve the algorithms’ results. Therefore, authors started investigating methods for community detection in attributed networks. In the past years, several methods were proposed to uncover this task, partitioning a graph into sub-graphs of vertices that are densely connected and similar in terms of their descriptions. This article focuses on the analysis and comparison of some of the proposed methods for community detection in attributed networks. For that purpose, several applications to both synthetic and real networks are conducted. Experiments are performed on both weighted and unweighted graphs. The objective is to establish which methods perform generally better according to the validation measures and to investigate their sensitivity to changes in the networks’ structure and homogeneity.