Overlapping Community Discovery Methods: A Survey

TL;DR

This survey reviews various methods for detecting overlapping communities in static and dynamic networks, highlighting their principles, complexities, and available software tools.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive classification and comparison of overlapping community detection methods, including recent approaches for dynamic networks.

Findings

Classified methods based on underlying principles

Included methods for static and dynamic networks

Provided computational complexity and software links

Abstract

The detection of overlapping communities is a challenging problem which is gaining increasing interest in recent years because of the natural attitude of individuals, observed in real-world networks, to participate in multiple groups at the same time. This review gives a description of the main proposals in the field. Besides the methods designed for static networks, some new approaches that deal with the detection of overlapping communities in networks that change over time, are described. Methods are classified with respect to the underlying principles guiding them to obtain a network division in groups sharing part of their nodes. For each of them we also report, when available, computational complexity and web site address from which it is possible to download the software implementing the method.