DynaMo: Dynamic Community Detection by Incrementally Maximizing Modularity

TL;DR

DynaMo is an efficient incremental algorithm for dynamic community detection that maximizes modularity, outperforming static and other dynamic methods in effectiveness and speed on real-world and synthetic networks.

Contribution

It introduces DynaMo, a novel incremental modularity-based algorithm for dynamic community detection that is both effective and significantly faster than static algorithms.

Findings

DynaMo outperforms five other dynamic algorithms in effectiveness.

DynaMo is 2 to 5 times faster than Louvain on average.

Extensive experiments on real-world and synthetic networks validate DynaMo's efficiency.

Abstract

Community detection is of great importance for online social network analysis. The volume, variety and velocity of data generated by today's online social networks are advancing the way researchers analyze those networks. For instance, real-world networks, such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, are inherently growing rapidly and expanding aggressively over time. However, most of the studies so far have been focusing on detecting communities on the static networks. It is computationally expensive to directly employ a well-studied static algorithm repeatedly on the network snapshots of the dynamic networks. We propose DynaMo, a novel modularity-based dynamic community detection algorithm, aiming to detect communities of dynamic networks as effective as repeatedly applying static algorithms but in a more efficient way. DynaMo is an adaptive and incremental algorithm, which is designed for incrementally maximizing the modularity gain while updating the community structure of dynamic networks. In the experimental evaluation, a comprehensive comparison has been made among DynaMo, Louvain (static) and 5 other dynamic algorithms. Extensive experiments have been conducted on 6 real-world networks and 10,000 synthetic networks. Our results show that DynaMo outperforms all the other 5 dynamic algorithms in terms of the effectiveness, and is 2 to 5 times (by average) faster than Louvain algorithm.