Community Detection Algorithm for Social Networking: FaNClust

Abstract

The problem of community detection in social media has been widely studied in the social networking community in the context of the structure of the underlying graphs. Most community detection algorithms use the links between the nodes in order to determine the dense regions in the graph. These dense regions are the communities of social media in the graph. Such methods are typically based purely on the linkage structure of the underlying social media network. Community detection algorithms are fundamental tools that allow us to uncover organizational principles in networks. When detecting communities, there are two possible sources of information one can use: the network structure, and the features and attributes of nodes. Even though communities form around nodes that have common edges and common attributes, typically, algorithms have only focused on one of these two data modalities: community detection algorithms traditionally focus only on the network structure, while clustering algorithms mostly consider only node attributes. In this paper, we explore a range of network community detection methods in order to compare them and to understand their relative performance and the systematic biases in the clusters they identify. We evaluate several common objective functions that are used to formalize the notion of a network community, and we examine several different classes of approximation algorithms that aim to optimize such objective functions. In addition, rather than simply fixing an objective and asking for an approximation to the best community of any size, we consider a size-resolved version of the optimization problem. Considering community quality as a function of its size provides a much finer lens with which to examine community detection algorithms, since objective functions and approximation algorithms often have non-obvious size-dependent behavior. And we propose a new algorithm fast Network Clustering Algorithm (FaNClust) for better performance.