A Comparison of Community Detection Algorithms on Artificial Networks

International audienceCommunity detection has become a very important part in complex networks analysis. Authors traditionally test their algorithms on a few real or artificial networks. Testing on real networks is necessary, but also limited: the considered real networks are usually small, the actual underlying communities are generally not defined objectively, and it is not possible to control their properties. Generating artificial networks makes it possible to overcome these limitations. Until recently though, most works used variations of the classic Erdős-Rényi random model and consequently suffered from the same flaws, generating networks not realistic enough. In this work, we use Lancichinetti et al. model, which is able to generate networks with controlled power-law degree and community distributions, to test some community detection algorithms. We analyze the properties of the generated networks and use the normalized mutual information measure to assess the quality of the results and compare the considered algorithms