Ranking community detection algorithms for complex social networks using multilayer network design approach

Community detection is a significant research field in the study of social networks and analysis because of its tremendous applicability in multiple domains such as recommendation systems, link prediction and information diffusion. The majority of the present community detection methods considers either node information only or edge information only, but not both, which can result in loss of important information regarding network structures. In real-world social networks such as Facebook and Twitter, there are many heterogeneous aspects of the entities that connect them together such as different type of interactions occurring, which are difficult to study with the help of homogeneous network structures. The purpose of this study is to explore multilayer network design to capture these heterogeneous aspects by combining different modalities of interactions in single network.

In this work, multilayer network model is designed while taking into account node information as well as edge information. Existing community detection algorithms are applied on the designed multilayer network to find the densely connected nodes. Community scoring functions and partition comparison are used to further analyze the community structures. In addition to this, analytic hierarchical processing-technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution (AHP-TOPSIS)-based framework is proposed for selection of an optimal community detection algorithm.

In the absence of reliable ground-truth communities, it becomes hard to perform evaluation of generated network communities. To overcome this problem, in this paper, various community scoring functions are computed and studied for different community detection methods.

In this study, evaluation criteria are considered to be independent. The authors observed that the criteria used are having some interdependencies, which could not be captured by the AHP method. Therefore, in future, analytic network process may be explored to capture these interdependencies among the decision attributes.

Proposed ranking can be used to improve the search strategy of algorithms to decrease the search time of the best fitting one according to the case study. The suggested study ranks existing community detection algorithms to find the most appropriate one.

Community detection is useful in many applications such as recommendation systems, health care, politics, economics, e-commerce, social media and communication network.

Ranking of the community detection algorithms is performed using community scoring functions as well as AHP-TOPSIS methods.