Adaptive modularity maximization via edge weighting scheme

Modularity maximization is one of the state-of-the-art methods for community detection that has gained popularity in the last decade. Yet it suffers from the resolution limit problem by preferring under certain conditions large communities over small ones. To solve this problem, we propose to expand the meaning of the edges that are currently used to indicate propensity of nodes for sharing the same community. In our approach this is the role of edges with positive weights while edges with negative weights indicate aversion for putting their end-nodes into one community. We also present a novel regression model which assigns weights to the edges of a graph according to their local topological features to enhance the accuracy of modularity maximization algorithms. We construct artificial graphs based on the parameters sampled from a given unweighted network and train the regression model on ground truth communities of these artificial graphs in a supervised fashion. The extraction of local topological edge features can be done in linear time, making this process efficient. Experimental results on real and synthetic networks show that the state-of-the-art community detection algorithms improve their performance significantly by finding communities in the weighted graphs produced by our model.