Toward small community discovery in social networks

A community in a social network can be viewed as a structure formed by individuals who share similar interests. Not all communities are explicit; some may be hidden in a large network. Therefore, discovering these hidden communities becomes an interesting problem. Researchers from a number of fields have developed algorithms to tackle this problem.

Besides the common feature above, communities within a social network have two unique characteristics: communities are mostly small and overlapping. Unfortunately, many traditional algorithms have difficulty recognizing these small communities (often called the resolution limit problem) as well as overlapping communities.

In this work, two enhanced community detection techniques are proposed for re-working existing community detection algorithms to find small communities in social networks. One method is to modify the modularity measure within the framework of the traditional Newman-Girvan algorithm so that more small communities can be detected. The second method is to incorporate a preprocessing step into existing algorithms by changing edge weights inside communities. Both methods help improve community detection performance while maintaining or improving computational efficiency.