A Note on Detection of Communities in Social Networks

Abstract

The modern Science of Social Networks has brought significant advances to our understanding of the Structure, dynamics and evolution of the Network. One of the important features of graphs representing the Social Networks is community structure. The communities can be considered as fairly independent components of the social graph that helps identify groups of users with similar interests, locations, friends, or occupations. The community structure is closely tied to triangles and their count forms the basis of community detection algorithms. The present work takes into consideration, a triangle instead of the edge as the basic indicator of a strong relation in the social graph. A simple triangle counting algorithm is then used to evaluate different metrics that are employed to detect strong communities. The methodology is applied to Zachary Social network and discussed. The results bring out the usefulness of counting triangles in a network to detect strong communities in a Social Network.