Comparing the Community Structure Identified by Overlapping Methods.

Community detection is one of the most important tasks in network analysis. Recently, an increasing number of researchers have been dedicated to investigating networks in which the nodes participate concomitantly in more than one community. This work presents a comparative study of five state-of-art methods for overlapping community detection from the perspective of the structural properties of the communities identified by them. Experiments with benchmark and groundtruth networks show that, although the methods are able to identify modular communities, they often miss many structural properties of the communities, such as the number of nodes in the overlapping region and the membership of the nodes.