Defining and Evaluating Network Communities based on Ground-truth

Understand

Nodes in real-world networks organize into densely linked communities where edges appear with high concentration among the members of the community.

• Identifying such communities of nodes has proven to be a challenging task mainly due to a plethora of definitions of a community, intractability of algorithms, issues with evaluation and the lack of a reliable gold-standard ground-truth.
• In this paper we study a set of 230 large real-world social, collaboration and information networks where nodes explicitly state their group memberships.
• For example, in social networks nodes explicitly join various interest based social groups.