Overlapping Community Detection in Networks: The State-of-the-Art and Comparative Study

This article reviews the state-of-the-art in overlapping community detection algorithms, quality measures, and benchmarks. A thorough comparison of different algorithms (a total of fourteen) is provided. In addition to community-level evaluation, we propose a framework for evaluating algorithms' ability to detect overlapping nodes, which helps to assess overdetection and underdetection. After considering community-level detection performance measured by normalized mutual information, the Omega index, and node-level detection performance measured by F-score, we reached the following conclusions. For low overlapping density networks, SLPA, OSLOM, Game, and COPRA offer better performance than the other tested algorithms. For networks with high overlapping density and high overlapping diversity, both SLPA and Game provide relatively stable performance. However, test results also suggest that the detection in such networks is still not yet fully resolved. A common feature observed by various algorithms in real-world networks is the relatively small fraction of overlapping nodes (typically less than 30%), each of which belongs to only 2 or 3 communities.