Identification of Overlapping Communities by Locally Calculating Community-Changing Resolution Levels

An algorithm for the detection of overlapping natural communities in networks was proposed by Lancichinetti, Fortunato, and Kertesz (LFK) last year. The LFK algorithm constructs natural communities of (in principle) all nodes of a graph by maximising the local fitness of communities. The resulting modules can overlap. The generation of communities can easily be repeated for many values of resolution; thus allowing different views on the network at different resolutions. We implemented the main idea of the LFK algorithm---to generate natural communities of each node of a network---in a different way. We start with a value of the resolution parameter that is high enough for each node to be its own natural community. As soon as the resolution is reduced, each node acquires other nodes as members of its community, i.e. natural communities grow. For each community found at a certain resolution level we calculate the next lower resolution where a node is added. After adding a node to a community of a seed node we check whether it is also the natural community of a node that we have already analysed. In this case, we can stop expanding the seed node's community. We tested our algorithm on a small benchmark graph and on a network of about 500 papers in information science (weighted with the Salton index of bibliographic coupling). In our tests, this approach results in characteristic ranges of resolution where a large resolution change does not lead to a growth of the natural community. Such stable modules were also obtained by applying the LFK algorithm but since we determine communities for all resolution values in one run, our approach is faster than the LFK reference. And our algorithm reveals the hierarchical structure of the graph more easily.