A Modular Overlapping Community Detection Algorithm: Investigating the ``From Local to Global'' Approach

We propose an overlapping community detection algorithm following a “from local to global approach”: our algorithm finds local communities one by one by repetitively optimizing a quality function that measures the quality of a community. Then, as some extracted local communities can be very similar to each-other, a cleaning procedure is applied to obtain the global overlapping community structure. Our algorithm depends on three modules: (i) a quality function, (ii) an optimization heuristic and (iii) a cleaning procedure. Various such modules can be independently plugged in. We show that, using default modules, our algorithm improves over a state-of-the-art method on some real-world graphs with ground truth communities. In the future we would like to study which combination of modules performs best in practice and make our code parallel.