# Detecting Multiple Communities Using Quantum Annealing on the D-Wave System

## TL;DR

This paper explores the use of quantum annealing on D-Wave systems to detect multiple communities in networks, addressing a complex combinatorial problem with potential advantages over classical methods.

## Contribution

It presents a systematic study of community detection using quantum annealing, particularly focusing on detecting two or more communities with minimal reformulation.

## Key findings

- Quantum annealing effectively detects at most two communities.
- The approach demonstrates potential advantages in community detection.
- The study provides insights into applying quantum annealing to complex network problems.

## Abstract

A very important problem in combinatorial optimization is partitioning a network into communities of densely connected nodes; where the connectivity between nodes inside a particular community is large compared to the connectivity between nodes belonging to different ones. This problem is known as community detection, and has become very important in various fields of science including chemistry, biology and social sciences. The problem of community detection is a twofold problem that consists of determining the number of communities and, at the same time, finding those communities. This drastically increases the solution space for heuristics to work on, compared to traditional graph partitioning problems. In many of the scientific domains in which graphs are used, there is the need to have the ability to partition a graph into communities with the ``highest quality'' possible since the presence of even small isolated communities can become crucial to explain a particular phenomenon. We have explored community detection using the power of quantum annealers, and in particular the D-Wave 2X and 2000Q machines. It turns out that the problem of detecting at most two communities naturally fits into the architecture of a quantum annealer with almost no need of reformulation. This paper addresses a systematic study of detecting two or more communities in a network using a quantum annealer.