Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

The Difference Between Optimal And Germane Communities, Jerry Scripps, Christian Trefftz, Dr. Zachary Kurmas

Funded Articles

Networks often exhibit community structure and there are many algorithms that have been proposed to detect the communities. Different sets of communities have different characteristics. Community finding algorithms that are designed to optimize a single statistic tend to detect communities with a narrow set of characteristics. In this paper, we present evidence for the differences in community characteristics. In addition, we present two new community finding algorithms that allow analysts to find community sets that are not only high quality but also germane to the characteristics that are desired.