The stability of a graph partition: A dynamics-based framework for community detection

Abstract

Recent years have seen a surge of interest in the analysis of complex systems. This trend has been facilitated by the availability of relational data and the increasingly powerful computational resources that can be employed for their analysis. A unifying concept in the study of complex systems is their formalisation as networks comprising a large number of non-trivially interacting agents. By considering a network perspective, it is hoped to gain a deepened understanding of system-level properties beyond what could be achieved by focussing solely on the constituent units. Naturally, the study of real-world systems leads to highly complex networks and a current challenge is to extract intelligible, simplified descriptions from the network in terms of relevant subgraphs (or communities), which can provide insight into the structure and function of the overall system.