Skip to main content
Log in

Evaluation of local community metrics: from an experimental perspective

  • Published:
Journal of Intelligent Information Systems Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Local community detection (LCD for short) aims at finding a community structure in a network starting from a seed (i.e., a “local” starting vertex). In a process of LCD, local community metrics are crucial since they serve as the measurements for the quality of the detected local community. Even if various algorithms have been proposed for LCD, there has been few investigation on the key features of these local community metrics, resulting in a lack of guidelines on how to choose these metrics in practice. To make up this inadequacy, this paper first investigates the effectiveness and efficiency of local community metrics via LCD accuracy comparison and scalability study, and then studies the insensitivity of these metrics to different seeds in a target community structure, followed by evaluating their performance on local communities with noisy vertices inside. In addition, a set of guidelines for the selection of local community metrics are given based on our findings concluded from extensive experiments.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 3
Fig. 4

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. http://snap.stanford.edu/

References

  • Ahn, Y.Y., Bagrow, J.P., & Lehmann, S. (2010). Link communities reveal multi-scale complexity in networks. Nature, 466, 761–764.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Bagrow, J.P. (2008). Evaluating local community methods in networks. Journal of Statistical Mechanics-Theory and Experiment, 5, P05,001.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bagrow, J.P., & Bollt, E.M. (2005). Local method for detecting communities. Physical Review E, 72(4), 046–108.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Blondel, V.D., Guillaume, J.L., Lambiotte, R., & Lefebvre, E. (2008). Fast unfolding of communities in large networks. Journal of Statistical Mechanics-Theory and Experiment, P10008.

  • Chen, J., Zaïane, O.R., & Goebel, R. (2009). Detecting communities in social networks using max-min modularity, SDM (pp. 978–989).

  • Chen, J., Zaïane, O.R., & Goebel, R. (2009). Local community identification in social networks, ASNAM (pp. 237–242).

  • Ciglan, M., Laclavik, M., & Nørvåg, K. (2013). On community detection in real-world networks and the importance of degree assortativity, KDD (pp. 1007–1015).

  • Clauset, A. (2005). Finding local community structure in networks. Physical Review E, 72(2), 026,132.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Coscia, M., Rossetti, G., Giannotti, F., & Pedreschi, D. (2012). Demon: a local-first discovery method for overlapping communities, KDD (pp. 615–623).

  • Cui, W., Xiao, Y., Wang, H., & Wang, W. (2014). Local search of communities in large graphs, SIGMOD (pp. 991–1002).

  • Duch, J., & Arenas, A. (2005). Community detection in complex networks using extremal optimization. Physical Review E 72(2).

  • Fortunato, S. (2010). Community detection in graphs. Physics Reports, 486(3–5), 75–174.

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  • Fortunato, S., & Barthelemy, M. (2007). Resolution limit in community detection. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 104(1), 36–41.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Girvan, M., & Newman, M.E.J. (2002). Community structure in social and biological networks. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 99(12), 7821–7826.

    Article  MathSciNet  MATH  Google Scholar 

  • Gleich, D.F., & Seshadhri, C. (2012). Vertex neighborhoods, low conductance cuts, and good seeds for local community methods, KDD (pp. 597–605).

  • Huang, H., Chiew, K., Gao, Y., He, Q., & Li, Q. (2014). Rare category exploration. Expert Systems with Applications, 41(9), 4197–4210.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Huang, H., Gao, Y., Chiew, K., He, Q., & Zheng, B. (2014). Unsupervised analysis of top-k core members in poly-relational networks. Expert Systems with Applications, 41(13), 5689–5710.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Huang, J., Sun, H., Han, J., Deng, H., Sun, Y., & Liu, Y. (2010). Shrink: a structural clustering algorithm for detecting hierarchical communities in networks, CIKM (pp. 219–228).

  • Huang, J., Sun, H., Liu, Y., Song, Q., & Weninger, T. (2011). Towards online multiresolution community detection in large-scale networks. PLOS ONE, 6(8), e23–829.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Lancichinetti, A., & Fortunato, S. (2009). Community detection algorithms: a comparative analysis. Physical Review E, 80(5), 056–117.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Lancichinetti, A., Fortunato, S., & Kertesz, J. (2009). Detecting the overlapping and hierarchical community structure in complex networks. New Journal of Physics, 11 (033), 015.

    Google Scholar 

  • Leskovec, J., Kleinberg, J.M., & Faloutsos, C. (2007). Graph evolution: densification and shrinking diameters. ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data 1(1).

  • Leskovec, J., Lang, K.J., & Mahoney, M.W. (2010). Empirical comparison of algorithms for network community detection, WWW (pp. 631–640).

  • Luo, F., Wang, J.Z., & Promislow, E. (2006). Exploring local community structures in large networks, WI (pp. 233–239).

  • Ma, L., Huang, H., He, Q., Chiew, K., Wu, J., & Che, Y. (2013). GMAC: a seed-insensitive approach to local community detection, Dawak (pp. 297–308).

  • Ma, L., Huang, H., He, Q., Chiew, K., & Liu, Z. (2014). Toward seed-insensitive solutions to local community detection. Journal of Intelligent Information Systems, 43 (1), 183–203.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Newman, M.E.J., & Girvan, M. (2004). Finding and evaluating community structure in networks. Physical Review E 69(2).

  • Shi, J., & Malik, J. (2000). Normalized cuts and image segmentation. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 22(8), 888–905.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Shibata, N., Kajikawa, Y., Takeda, Y., Sakata, I., & Matsushima, K. (2011). Detecting emerging research fronts in regenerative medicine by the citation network analysis of scientific publications. Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 78(2), 274–282.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Sun, H., Huang, J., Han, J., Deng, H., Zhao, P., & Feng, B. (2010). Gskeletonclu: density-based network clustering via structure-connected tree division or agglomeration, ICDM (pp. 481–490).

  • Wang, G., Zhao, Y., Shi, X., & Yu, P.S. (2012). Magnet community identification on social networks, KDD (pp. 588–596).

  • Watts, D.J., & Strogatz, S.H. (1998). Collective dynamics of small-world networks. Nature, 393(6684), 440–442.

    Article  MATH  Google Scholar 

  • Yang, J., & Leskovec, J. (2012). Defining and evaluating network communities based on ground-truth, ICDM (pp. 745–754).

  • Zhang, W., Pan, G., Wu, Z., & Li, S. (2013). Online community detection for large complex networks, IJCAI (pp. 1903–1909).

Download references

Acknowledgements

This work is partially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant No. 61472359.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Qinming He.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Ma, L., Chiew, K., Huang, H. et al. Evaluation of local community metrics: from an experimental perspective. J Intell Inf Syst 51, 1–22 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10844-017-0480-5

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Revised:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10844-017-0480-5

Keywords

Navigation