Analyzing Modularity Maximization in Approximation, Heuristic, and Graph Neural Network Algorithms for Community Detection

Samin Aref; Mahdi Mostajabdaveh

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arXiv · 2310.10898

Analyzing Modularity Maximization in Approximation, Heuristic, and Graph Neural Network Algorithms for Community Detection

Samin Aref·Mahdi Mostajabdaveh

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Abstract

Community detection, which involves partitioning nodes within a network, has widespread applications across computational sciences. Modularity-based algorithms identify communities by attempting to maximize the modularity function across network node partitions. Our study assesses the performance of various modularity-based algorithms in obtaining optimal partitions. Our analysis utilizes 104 networks, including both real-world instances from diverse contexts and modular graphs from two families of synthetic benchmarks. We analyze ten inexact modularity-based algorithms against the exact integer programming baseline that globally optimizes modularity. Our comparative analysis includes eight heuristics, two variants of a graph neural network algorithm, and nine variations of the Bayan approximation algorithm. Our findings reveal that the average modularity-based heuristic yields optimal partitions in only 43.9% of the 104 networks analyzed. Graph neural networks and approximate Bayan, on average, achieve optimality on 68.7% and 82.3% of the networks respectively. Additionally, our analysis of three partition similarity metrics exposes substantial dissimilarities between high-modularity sub-optimal partitions and any optimal partition of the networks. We observe that near-optimal partitions are often disproportionately dissimilar to any optimal partition. Taken together, our analysis points to a crucial limitation of the commonly used modularity-based methods: they rarely produce an optimal partition or a partition resembling an optimal partition even on networks with modular structures. If modularity is to be used for detecting communities, we recommend approximate optimization algorithms for a more methodologically sound usage of modularity within its applicability limits.

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cs.SI cond-mat.stat-mech cs.LG math.OC

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Samin Aref, Mahdi Mostajabdaveh. 2023-10-17. Analyzing Modularity Maximization in Approximation, Heuristic, and Graph Neural Network Algorithms for Community Detection. https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.10898

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