Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Community Detection In Complex Networks, Zhenqi Lu

McKelvey School of Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Network science plays a central role in understanding and modeling complex systems in many disciplines, including physics, sociology, biology, computer science, economics, politics, and neuroscience. By studying networks, we can gain a deep understanding of the behavior of the systems they represent. Many networks exhibit community structure, i.e., they have clusters of nodes that are locally densely interconnected. These communities manifest the hierarchical organization of the objects in systems, and detecting communities greatly facilitates the study of the organization and structure of complex systems.

Most existing community-detection methods consider low-order connection patterns, at the level of individual links. But high-order …