Research: Communities and the Networks That Define Them

Communities and the Networks That Define Them
Dr. Dobb's Journal (03/17/08) Erickson, Jon

An algorithm that is capable of automatically identifying communities and their structures in different networks is the focus of a new paper by Weixiong Zhang of Washington University and Jianhua Ruan of the University of Texas at San Antonio. All disparate communities have networks that define their structure, Zhang says. As part of the natural division in the community structure of networks, the vertices in each subnetwork are highly interconnected but not as strongly with the rest of the network. Researchers tend to believe that each community may correspond to a fundamental functional unit. Zhang teamed up with Ruan to develop the algorithm, which exceeds similar algorithms in scalability and is capable of detecting communities at a finer scale and with higher accuracy. The algorithm has also been used to conduct genomics-related research.
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