A comparative study of overlapping community detection methods from the perspective of the structural properties

Abstract

Community detection is one of the most important tasks in network analysis. It is increasingly clear that quality measures are not sufficient for assessing communities and structural properties play a key hole in understanding how nodes are organized in the network. This work presents a comparative study of some representative state-of-the-art methods for overlapping community detection from the perspective of the structural properties of the communities identified by them. Experiments with synthetic and real-world benchmark Ground-Truth networks show that, although the methods are able to identify modular communities, they often miss many structural properties of the communities, such as the number of nodes in the overlapping region and the memberships of the nodes. This is a strong suggestion that a deeper comprehension of the overlapping properties of the communities is needed for the design of more efficient community detection methods.