Statistical properties of community structure in large social and information networks. In WWW ’08
Statistical properties of community structure in large social and information networks. In WWW ’08
Citation
Leskovec, Jure, et al. "Statistical properties of community structure in large social and information networks." Proceeding of the 17th international conference on World Wide Web. ACM, 2008.
Online version
Summary
This Paper discusses some statistical properties and observed facts of community structure when using network community profile (NCP) plot, which measures the quality of "best" community (they use conductance to measure the quality) as a function of community size. The main empirical findings are as following:
- There exists a specific size, which empirically is roughly 100 nodes, for the global "best" community. And before this size, there exist well-separated communities (called Whiskers by the author) and they often can be combined well into meaningful larger communities. However, after this size, the best possible communities become more and more "blended into" the remainder of the network and less and less community-like.
- This specific "best" size for meaningful communities seems irrelevant with network size.
And their observed properties are not reproduced, at even a qualitative level, by any of the commonly-used network generation models they have examined, including preferential attachment, copying, and hierarchical network models.
