949,914 research outputs found
Discovering Communities of Community Discovery
Discovering communities in complex networks means grouping nodes similar to
each other, to uncover latent information about them. There are hundreds of
different algorithms to solve the community detection task, each with its own
understanding and definition of what a "community" is. Dozens of review works
attempt to order such a diverse landscape -- classifying community discovery
algorithms by the process they employ to detect communities, by their
explicitly stated definition of community, or by their performance on a
standardized task. In this paper, we classify community discovery algorithms
according to a fourth criterion: the similarity of their results. We create an
Algorithm Similarity Network (ASN), whose nodes are the community detection
approaches, connected if they return similar groupings. We then perform
community detection on this network, grouping algorithms that consistently
return the same partitions or overlapping coverage over a span of more than one
thousand synthetic and real world networks. This paper is an attempt to create
a similarity-based classification of community detection algorithms based on
empirical data. It improves over the state of the art by comparing more than
seventy approaches, discovering that the ASN contains well-separated groups,
making it a sensible tool for practitioners, aiding their choice of algorithms
fitting their analytic needs
DEMON: a Local-First Discovery Method for Overlapping Communities
Community discovery in complex networks is an interesting problem with a
number of applications, especially in the knowledge extraction task in social
and information networks. However, many large networks often lack a particular
community organization at a global level. In these cases, traditional graph
partitioning algorithms fail to let the latent knowledge embedded in modular
structure emerge, because they impose a top-down global view of a network. We
propose here a simple local-first approach to community discovery, able to
unveil the modular organization of real complex networks. This is achieved by
democratically letting each node vote for the communities it sees surrounding
it in its limited view of the global system, i.e. its ego neighborhood, using a
label propagation algorithm; finally, the local communities are merged into a
global collection. We tested this intuition against the state-of-the-art
overlapping and non-overlapping community discovery methods, and found that our
new method clearly outperforms the others in the quality of the obtained
communities, evaluated by using the extracted communities to predict the
metadata about the nodes of several real world networks. We also show how our
method is deterministic, fully incremental, and has a limited time complexity,
so that it can be used on web-scale real networks.Comment: 9 pages; Proceedings of the 18th ACM SIGKDD International Conference
on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, Beijing, China, August 12-16, 201
Communication and the Knowable Community
This essay draws on Raymond Williams\u27s concept of a knowable community in an effort to understand the myriad of connections that exist between individuals and society. Williams, who sees communication and community as synonymous, suggests that a knowable community may ultimately emerge through the process of communication and that in the discovery of connections between individuals and society, an understanding of historically specific patterns may be shown. This essay also discusses an oral history project with journalists who worked for Gannett in the 1960s as an example of an emerging knowable community that questioned traditional notions of community and challenged dominant ideological constructions of media history
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