Enhancing Efficiency in Parallel Louvain Algorithm for Community Detection

TL;DR

This paper improves the parallelization of the Louvain community detection algorithm, balancing speed and quality, by analyzing various strategies and optimizing parameters for multi-threaded execution.

Contribution

It introduces optimized parallel versions of the Louvain algorithm, evaluates their performance, and proposes a chunking approach for shared-memory systems.

Findings

Asynchronous version with specific parameters yields best results

Parallelization is challenging for shared-memory systems

Chunking approach can improve scalability

Abstract

Community detection is a key aspect of network analysis, as it allows for the identification of groups and patterns within a network. With the ever-increasing size of networks, it is crucial to have fast algorithms to analyze them efficiently. It is a modularity-based greedy algorithm that divides a network into disconnected communities better over several iterations. Even in big, dense networks, it is renowned for establishing high-quality communities. However it can be at least a factor of ten slower than community discovery techniques that rely on label-propagation, which are generally extremely fast but obtain communities of lower quality. The researchers have suggested a number of methods for parallelizing and improving the Louvain algorithm. To decide which strategy is generally the best fit and which parameter values produce the highest performance without compromising community quality, it is critical to assess the performance and accuracy of these existing approaches. As we implement the single-threaded and multi-threaded versions of the static Louvain algorithm in this report, we carefully examine the method's specifics, make the required tweaks and optimizations, and determine the right parameter values. The tolerance between each pass can be changed to adjust the method's performance. With an initial tolerance of 0.01 and a tolerance decline factor of 10, an asynchronous version of the algorithm produced the best results. Generally speaking, according to our findings, the approach is not well suited for shared-memory parallelism; however, one potential workaround is to break the graph into manageable chunks that can be independently executed and then merged back together.