Community Detection in Imperfect Networks
Year: 2011
Type: dissertation
Abstract: Community detection in networks is an important area of current research with many applications. Finding community structures is a challenging task and despite significant effort no satisfactory method has been found. Different methods find different communities in the same network and with different computational requirements. To counter this problem, several different methods are often used and the results compared manually. In this thesis, we present three different methods to instead merge the results from different methods (or several runs from the same algorithm) to find better estimates of the community structure. Another problem in practical applications is noisy and imperfect networks with missing and false edges. These imperfections are natural results from the methods used to map the network structure and are often difficult to eliminate. In this thesis, we apply a Monte Carlo-sampling method in combination with the introduced methods for merging community detection results to find community structures in such networks. The method is tested by simulation studies on both real-world networks and synthetic networks with generated uncertainties and imperfections. We finally demonstrate how it is possible to generate confidence levels of the obtained community structure from the merging methods. This allows for a qualitative comparison of the robustness and significance of the network clustering.
Author: Johan Dahlin
Institution: Swedish Defence Research Agency
Language: English
Subfield: Statistical and Nonlinear Physics
Field: Physics and Astronomy
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2121276676