Community Structure in Directed Networks

E. A. Leicht and M. E. J. Newman
Phys. Rev. Lett. 100, 118703 – Published 21 March 2008

Abstract

We consider the problem of finding communities or modules in directed networks. In the past, the most common approach to this problem has been to ignore edge direction and apply methods developed for community discovery in undirected networks, but this approach discards potentially useful information contained in the edge directions. Here we show how the widely used community finding technique of modularity maximization can be generalized in a principled fashion to incorporate information contained in edge directions. We describe an explicit algorithm based on spectral optimization of the modularity and show that it gives demonstrably better results than previous methods on a variety of test networks, both real and computer generated.

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  • Received 8 October 2007

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.100.118703

©2008 American Physical Society

Authors & Affiliations

E. A. Leicht1 and M. E. J. Newman1,2

  • 1Department of Physics, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109, USA
  • 2Center for the Study of Complex Systems, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109, USA

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Issue

Vol. 100, Iss. 11 — 21 March 2008

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