Community Detection Approaches in Real World Networks: A Survey and Classification

Abstract

Online social networks have been continuously evolving and one of their prominent features is the evolution of communities which can be characterized as a group of people who share a common relationship among themselves. Earlier studies on social network analysis focused on static network structures rather than dynamic processes, however, with the passage of time, the networks have also evolved and the researchers have started to focus on the aspect of studying dynamic behavior of networks. This paper aims to present an overview of community detection approaches graduating from static community detection methods towards the methods to identify dynamic communities in networks. The authors also present a classification of the existing dynamic community detection algorithms along the dimension of studying the evolution as either a two-step approach comprising of community detection via static methods and then applying temporal dynamics or a unified approach which comprises of dynamic detection of communities along with their evolutionary characteristics.