Social Network Analysis and Mining (2024) 14:93

https://doi.org/10.1007/s13278-024-01246-5

REVIEW PAPER

A comprehensive survey on community detection methods

and applications in complex information networks
Abdelhani Diboune1 · Hachem Slimani2 · Hassina Nacer1 · Kadda Beghdad Bey3

Received: 14 November 2023 / Revised: 14 February 2024 / Accepted: 19 March 2024

© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Austria, part of Springer Nature 2024

Abstract
This paper extensively reviews the literature of community detection in complex networks and proposes a general classifica-
tion describing the main models used for this purpose. Besides, a statistical study of the distribution of the recent relevant
literature has been realized to picture the tendency of the models used by the main works published in the context of com-
munity detection. This mainly helped the understanding of the suitable community model to be used in each real-world
network application. Furthermore, we establish a critical study of the state-of-the-art approaches according to the proposed
classification. Moreover, we investigate the relevant applications of communities in networks and we establish a statistical
study to illustrate the distribution of research works in the field of community detection. Finally, we discuss several open
issues and future research directions of approaches and applications that would be worth investigating in the area of com-
munity detection.

Keywords Network community detection · Graph clustering · Machine learning techniques · Multi-objective optimization ·
Game theoretic approaches · Networks applications

1 Introduction edge set (connections) represents relations or interactions

such as: friendship, trust, co-citations, etc. Even though the
Complex information networks are dynamic topological graph-based structures of many of these Complex informa-
structures which give an accurate modelization of many tion networks are very complex and show no trivial topol-
complex systems implying one or many specific interac- ogy, they generally share some common global statistical
tions or relations between their sub-components. The node features (Boccaletti et al. 2006): the small world property,
set in a complex network represents the components of the the scale-free degree distribution and a high-clustering coef-
system: profiles, web pages, web services, etc. while the ficient. The small world property means that the distance
between any two nodes in the network increases logarithmi-
cally with the network size, the connectivity distribution in
* Abdelhani Diboune
adiboune@usthb.dz complex networks is characterized by a power law. Finally,
complex network has a greater clustering coefficient that
Hachem Slimani
hachem.slimani@univ-bejaia.dz defines the fraction of connected triples of nodes which also
form cliques. According to their application fields, complex
Hassina Nacer
sino_nacer@yahoo.fr networks can be divided into four categories (Newman
2010): social networks, technological networks, biological
Kadda Beghdad Bey
k.beghdadbey@gmail.com networks and information networks (which include online
social networks). This paper studies the case of complex
1
MOVEP Laboratory, USTHB, BP 32, 16111 Bab Ezzouar, information networks.
Algiers, Algeria Recently, there has been renewed interest in complex
2
LIMED Laboratory, Faculty of Exact Sciences, University information network analysis. This is primarily due to the
of Bejaia, 06000 Bejaia, Algeria quick development of networks and their broad applica-
3
Informatics Systems Laboratory, Ecole Militaire bility in many academic and industrial domains ranging
Polytechnique, BP 17, 16046 Bordj El Bahri, Algiers, from recommender systems, friend recommendation, Sybil
Algeria

Vol.:(0123456789)
 93 Page 2 of 47
defense, to web research. On the other hand, in spite of
the large and increasing amount of literature on network
analysis, the scalability and time complexity of the net-
work analysis algorithms remain undecided issues. In this
context, finding a mesoscopic scale structure of the inter-
connection network can be used as a solution for compu-
tational complexity of algorithms in large networks (For-
tunato 2010). Indeed, automatic discovery of communities
could be an adequate solution for revealing functionally
associated coalitions in the network and providing a way
of reducing time complexity of many applications by tar-
geting only relevant clusters.
Many researchers have studied the community detection
problem and proposed many approaches based on various
methods such as spectral clustering (Nascimento and Car-
valho 2011), game theory (Jonnalagadda and Kuppusamy
2016), evolutionary computation (Pizzuti 2018), etc. How-
ever, the notion of community remains ill-defined and till
now, there is no unique formal consensual definition of
network communities. In fact, according to their applica-
tion fields, researchers have different assumptions to for-
mally define communities (Fortunato 2010; Jonnalagadda
and Kuppusamy 2016). Furthermore, community detec-
tion is an NP-hard problem, which means that even though
in many cases, it could be solved through an exhaustive
search, the required running time is forbiddingly very large
(Hämäläinen 2006). Hence, on this scope, there has been
a growing interest in developing and analyzing less time-
consuming algorithms in the literature.
This paper intends to survey the state of the art of com-
munity detection in complex networks. In comparison to the
existing works, this paper aims to interpret the underlying
communities in complex information networks according to
their characteristics and application domains. In this setting,
the main aim is to determine for each situation what is the
suitable mathematical model to be used for describing com-
munities. Another purpose is to develop a statistical study
which depicts the distribution of research works in the area
of community detection in real-world networks.
The reminder of this paper is organized as follows: the
next section outlines the main related works and contribu-
tions. Section 3 presents our research methodology adopted
during the elaboration of our survey. Section 4 describes our
classification proposal of the existing community models
in the literature. Sections 5–8, present for every model a
review and a comparative study according to well-chosen
criteria of the main community detection approaches used
in literature. In Sect. 9, we describe the different network
application domains that use underlying communities as an
additional dimension to enhance their performance. Sec-
tion 10 discusses open issues while presenting some inter-
esting research directions which may be worth investigating
as future work. Finally, Sect. 11 concludes the paper.
Social Network Analysis and Mining (2024) 14:93
2 Related work and contributions
2.1 Existing surveys in the literature
Many relevant surveys explored the field of community
detection from various perspectives. In this setting, Fortu-
nato (2010) considered community depiction in undirected
interconnection graph from the standpoint of statistical
physics. In addition to that, the author discussed some cru-
cial issues such as the importance of clustering and how
the different approaches should be tested. Furthermore,
he described some applications of community detection
to real networks. Additionally, Nascimento and Carvalho
(2011) discussed various graph clustering approaches to
detect communities which are based on graph cut, graph
partitioning, and spectral clustering algorithms. Moreover,
Plantié and Crampes (2013) proposed an original survey on
community detection, covering both semantics and cluster-
ing results of the different approaches used. Furthermore,
it presents three main analytical approaches for detecting
communities that include the main methods in literature.
The first approach, considers the social network as a graph
and then analyzes its structure. The second approach
associates the network with a hypergraph and inspects its
structure. Finally, the third approach uses the properties
of concept lattices in order to study the network structure.
Furthermore, Jonnalagadda and Kuppusamy (2016) pro-
posed a survey that describes a taxonomy of game models
and their characteristics as well as their performance. They
discussed the interesting applications of game theory for
community detection in social networks and gave future
research directions in this context. On the other hand, Piz-
zuti (2018) provided a complete overview of methods used
for community detection based on evolutionary computa-
tion. More specifically, her survey focused on methods
based on Genetic Algorithms and Evolutionary strategies
in general, as well as other Nature-inspired approaches for
finding communities. These approaches are applied in vari-
ous types of complex interconnection networks, including
undirected, directed, and ad hoc networks. Moreover, Jin
et al. (2021) proposed a comprehensive survey of commu-
nity detection approaches in the case of a bloc stochastic
model of communities. In this scope, they distinguished
two main classes of approaches: Probabilistic graphical
model based approaches which are subdivided into three
subclasses depending on the type of probabilistic graphical
models which are dealt with (directed, undirected cases),
and Deep learning-based methods which include many
Deep learning strategies: Auto-encoder-based, Generative
adversarial network based, Graph convolutional network
based, and integrating Graph convolutional networks and
Undirected graphical models. Besides, Su et al. (2022)
Social Network Analysis and Mining (2024) 14:93
proposed a new taxonomy that covers different community
detection methods based on deep learning. Their classifica-
tion includes Convolutional networks, Graph attention net-
works, Generative adversarial networks, and Autoencoders.
The survey then discusses some practical applications of
community detection in many domains and suggests some
implementation scenarios.
2.2 Contributions of the survey
Even though these existing surveys (Fortunato 2010; Nasci-
mento and Carvalho 2011; Plantié and Crampes 2013; Jon-
nalagadda and Kuppusamy 2016; Fortunato and Hric 2016;
Pizzuti 2018; Jin et al. 2021; Su et al. 2022) treated commu-
nity detection in much detail, their studies are limited only
to one or two models as shown in Table 1. Thus, it would
be interesting to study a broader taxonomy of community
detection approaches that allows to include the main differ-
ent models in literature, depicts research trends, establishes
more extensive comparative analysis, and shows their pros
and cons. Furthermore, the applicability of communities
in real applications has not been given sufficient attention,
which in our opinion one of the most important issues in
community detection field. Moreover, it would be worth to
investigate the relationships between these applications and
the main models. To overcome these lacks, we produce in
this paper an extensive research survey dedicated to the com-
munity detection in complex networks where we investigate
essentially more theoretical models of communities and their
applicability to real network applications. More specifically,
the main contributions of our work are illustrated in Table 1
and summarized as follows:
Table 1  Comparison with some existing surveys on community detection
Existing surveys Models of works reviewed
Fortunato (2010) Graph model
Nascimento and Carvalho (2011) Graph model
Plantié and Crampes (2013) Graph model
Jonnalagadda and Kuppusamy (2016) Game model
Fortunato and Hric (2016) Graph model
Pizzuti (2018) MOO model
Jin et al. (2021) Graph model (Stochastic), ML model Online social network analysis, Image under-
Su et al. (2022) ML model
Our survey Graph model, ML model, MOO
model, Game model
Page 3 of 47 93
• It presents a more general classification based on the
main mathematical models used to describe communi-
ties in complex information networks. This classification
is supported by a statistical study of the main distribu-
tion of WoS-indexed relevant literature. This leads us to
realize a critical study that gives us broader picture and
insights about models and approaches used in literature
in the context of community detection.
• It establishes a critical comparative study of the state-
of-the-art approaches according to the proposed classi-
fication. This allows us to extract and visualize the main
characteristics as well as cons and pros of the models on
which our classification is based.
• It addresses the difficulty of interpreting communities in
complex information networks based on their application
areas. This helps us to determine the accurate community
model to be used according to the network applications.
• It provides a statistical study that shows the distribution
of the relevant search works in the field of community
detection in real-world complex networks. This illustrates
us the tendency of community detection utilization in
real world applications and by consequence, the eventual
lacuna in this context.
3 Research methodology
In order to investigate the main mathematical models of
communities used in literature as well as the common appli-
cations of communities in complex information networks,
we relied on a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) (Okoli
Network applications Statistical study
Biological functional associations, Friend com- No
munities
Not investigated No
Not investigated No
Not investigated No
Biological functional associations, Friend com- No
munities
Not investigated No
No
standing, Neuro-science
Collaborative filtering, Biochemistry, Sybil No
defense, Online social networks analysis,
Community deception, Community search
Collaborative filtering, Friend recommendation, Yes
Sybil defense, Web communities, Service
composition
 93 Page 4 of 47
and Schabram 2015). Thus, all substantial research works
published about these two fields were collected from Google
Scholar and many electronic scientific databases (Science-
Direct, SpringerLink, IEEE Xplore, etc.). For this purpose,
general keywords were used to retrieve a prior set of research
papers such as: Communities in complex networks, coali-
tions in complex networks, graph clustering in complex
networks, etc.
After a careful study of the titles, abstracts, keywords,
introductions and main contributions of the obtained set of
research papers, all irrelevant works were excluded. As a
result of this first step, we have noticed that the collected
research works fall into two main headings:
• The first heading consists of researches which concen-
trate on the investigation of mathematical models of
network communities and the development of accurate
methods to detect these communities. Nevertheless, they
do not deal with the real world applications of commu-
nities. The selected articles from the previous step that
fall in this first class were fully read, and a first gen-
eral classification was established. As result, we noticed
four basic models being adopted in literature which are:
Graph model, Machine learning model, Multi-objective
optimization model, and Game model. Furthermore, we
refined every class of community models by searching
more specific keywords such as: Graph clustering for
community detection, Graph partitioning, Supervised/
Unsupervised learning for community detection, Multi-
objective optimization for community detection, Coop-
erative game for community detection, etc. After that,
a deepen analysis of methodologies and contributions
described in these papers allowed us to deduce mainly
the essential frameworks and the approaches used for
every model. In this context, the different models and
frameworks recorded are discussed in Sects. 4, 5, 6, 7
and 8. The final stage consists of the study of the cur-
rent trend of community modelization used in high qual-
ity scientific literature. Thus, all works which were not
journal articles published in WoS-indeed journals were
excluded from the study. Moreover, all works anterior
of the year 2018 were not considered. The remaining
research works (113 journal articles) were classified
according to the models, frameworks and approaches
used, the results are discussed in Sect. 4.2.
• The second heading consists of research works that use
community structures in order to enhance existing net-
work applications. Generally, these studies focus neither
on proposing an approach to accurately detect communi-
ties, nor on proposing an optimized model to represent
communities. However, they just use community struc-
tures as an additional information to improve existing
network applications. As in the first heading, the papers
Social Network Analysis and Mining (2024) 14:93
initially selected were carefully read in order to judge
if the community notion is relatively a substantial part
of the articles contents, and to study the type of net-
work applications used. The most obvious findings that
emerged from this first investigation is that communities
are used in five main applications: Collaborative filter-
ing, Friend recommendation, Sybil defense, Web com-
munities, and Web service composition communities.
As relevant literature was scarcer in the context of com-
munity application, a broader time interval was needed
to collect a larger population of relevant high quality
research works. Indeed, to enrich the search, based on
the preliminary results, more specialized keywords were
used such as: Social community based collaborative fil-
tering, Profile clustering and friend recommender, Graph
cut and Sybil defense, web community detection, com-
munity based service composition, and so forth. This
extended set of articles (94 papers) was used to elaborate
a synthetic statistic study that reveals the tendency of
published works. In this scope, the main relevant works
published since 2010 have been censused and carefully
analyzed. The results are discussed in Sect. 9.
Table 2 illustrates an overview of the distribution of different
source categories used in our statistical studies of the two
headings: community models (including the resources that
were used in classification study but not used in statistical
study) and community applications.
4 Classification proposal and distribution
of research works relative to community
detection approaches in complex
networks
In this section, we propose a broader classification of the
state-of-the-art of community detection approaches in com-
plex networks. Then, we establish and discuss a distribution
Table 2  Distribution of different resource categories used in the clas-
sifications studies of our survey
Resource categories Community models Community
applications
Journal articles 127 54
Conference papers 13 40
Book chapters 0 0
Total 140 94
Total = 234
Social Network Analysis and Mining (2024) 14:93
of recent WoS-indexed relevant literature according to this
classification.
4.1 Classification proposal
To date, there is no general-consented definition of commu-
nity in networks, and many models were introduced in litera-
ture to describe some desirable mathematical characteristics
in communities (Fortunato 2010). This section examines the
main mathematical models of communities in complex net-
works which are used in literature relative to community
detection issue. In this setting, we have limited our study to
the formal theoretical approaches used to modele communi-
ties in networks without considering their applicability in
real information networks. Note that Sect. 10 of this work
is dedicated to this concern where the main applications
of community detection are categorized and discussed. In
addition to that, a statistical study and a classification of the
relevant research works according to the applicability aspect
is established.
In the context of community detection approaches, our
classification proposal is organized into three main levels as
shown in Fig. 1. More specifically, each level is described
as follows:
1. The first level is dedicated to the types of models that
picture the communities. In this context, we consider
four main models: Graph model, Machine-learning
model, Multi-objective optimization model, and Game
theory model.
2. The second level refers, for each model, to the kind of
frameworks followed for detecting these communities in
complex networks. In this context, Graph model includes
three main frameworks: Pattern detection, Spectral clus-
tering, and Stochastic approach. Furthermore, Machine
learning model considers: Unsupervised learning, Semi-
supervised learning, and Supervised learning. On the
other hand, Multi-Objective Optimization model takes
into account: Hierarchical, and Meta-heuristic frame-
works. Finally, Game theoretic model is divided into two
main frameworks: Non-cooperative games and Coopera-
tive games.
3. The third level lists the associated approaches used to
solve the community detection issue for every frame-
work.
4.2 Distribution of WoS‑indexed relevant literature
Following our proposed classification, we have categorized
more than one hundred relevant research works relative to
community models and frameworks in complex information
networks published in Web of Science journals during the
last six years as shown in Table 3 and Fig. 2.
Page 5 of 47 93
• What stands out in Figs. 2 and 3 is the predominance
of Machine learning model in the field of community
detection in complex information networks. With a
total percentage of about 51%, we remark that the ratio
of works published in the last few years increased rap-
idly (from 42 to 59% in 6 years).
• We notice that there has been a sharp fall in the ratio of
research works using Multi-objective model (from 47 to
25% ). This is mainly due to the mitigation toward deep
learning solutions (an approach of the Machine learn-
ing model) which generally ensure a better accuracy
than Multi-objective models which is mainly based on
Metaheuristics approaches (see Table 3).
• It is apparent from the chart of Fig. 3 that relatively
less abundant works using Graph model have been pub-
lished in the last six years (little more than 12%). This
is mainly due to the high time complexity of graph
approaches. In addition to that, graph models have dif-
ficulties to consider for clustering purpose all node fea-
tures, which are very relevant information for commu-
nity detection in real complex networks applications.
• Works on Game theory model are mostly preliminary
attempts and needs further investigations in order to be
more adapted to real large-scale network applications.
Following the proposed classification given in Fig. 1, in
the next four sections, we describe the different models
constituting the first level of the classification. Then, for
each model, we discuss the associated frameworks, the
relevant approaches used in each framework, and we estab-
lish a comparative study of some relevant research works
according to the following criteria:
✓ 
D etected community types: describes whether the
detected communities are overlapping communities or
Partitions (no-overlapping communities).
✓ 
Distribution: describes the computation type adopted by
the algorithm, i.e. distributed (parallel computation on
multiprocessing units), centralized (sequential computa-
tion on a mono-processing unit), parallelizable (central-
ized sequential computations, however, the algorithm
could be parallelized).
✓ 
Time complexity of the community detection algorithm
used.
✓ 
Scalability: says whether the scalability issue is consid-
ered or not while developing the approach.
✓ 
Application of the approach in complex networks.
 93 Page 6 of 47 Social Network Analysis and Mining (2024) 14:93

Fig. 1  The proposed classifica-

tion of community detection
approaches
Table 3  Distribution of WoS-indexed relevant literature related to community models and frameworks in complex information networks published from January 2018 to June 2023
Models Frameworks 2018–2019 2020–2021 2022–June 2023

Graph model Pattern – Zhu et al. (2020), Ramesh and Srivatsun Yang et al. (2022)
(2021)
Social Network Analysis and Mining

Machine learning model
Spectral Gui et al. (2018); Shi et al. (2019) Taştan et al. (2021) Francisquini et al. (2022)
Stochastic Li et al. (2018) Yi et al. (2021), Wu et al. (2021) Li et al. (2022), Contisciani et al. (2022),
Chen and Mo (2022), Okamoto and Qiu
(2022)
Unsupervised Wu et al. (2018), Sattari and Zamani- Wang et al. (2020), Yan and Chang (2020), Roozbahani et al. (2023), Fang and Lin
(2024) 14:93

far (2018b), Lei et al. (2019), Jin et al. Zhang et al. (2020), Lu et al. (2020), (2022), Luo and Xu (2022), Shang et al.
(2019), Sattari and Zamanifar (2018a), Nath et al. (2021), Roghani et al. (2021), (2023), Fang et al. (2022), Zhao et al.
Duan et al. (2019), Xie et al. (2019), Bouyer and Roghani (2020), Xu et al. (2022), Liu et al. (2023), Traag and Šubelj
Deng et al. (2019), Li (2019), Ding et al. (2020), Li et al. (2021), Rostami and Ous- (2023), Laassem et al. (2022), Gholami
(2018), Cao et al. (2018), He et al. (2019), salah (2022), Malhotra and Chug (2021), et al. (2022), Niu et al. (2023), Al-Andoli
Yan and Chang (2019) Wang et al. (2021), Huang et al. (2021), et al. (2022), Chen et al. (2022), Salha-
Zhang and Zhou (2020) Galvan et al. (2022), Zhou et al. (2023),
Hosseini-Pozveh et al. (2022), Al-sharoa
and Rahahleh (2023)
Semi-supervised Li et al. (2018), Nan et al. (2018), He et al. Qin and Lei (2021), Lu et al. (2020), Feng Fang and Lin (2022), He et al. (2022), Yuan
(2019) et al. (2021), De Santo et al. (2021) et al. (2023)
Supervised – Cai et al. (2020) Ali et al. (2023), Costa and Ralha (2023),
Cai et al. (2022)
Multi-objective optimization model Hierarchical Liu and Ma (2019), Li et al. (2019), Haq – Mishra et al. (2021), Qie et al. (2022), Zhao
et al. (2019) et al. (2023)
Meta-heuristic Bello-Orgaz et al. (2018), Li et al. (2019), Malhotra (2021), Zhang et al. (2020), Reihanian et al. (2023), Shen et al. (2022),
Rahimi et al. (2018), Pattanayak et al. Zhang et al. (2020), Su et al. (2021), Ma Shang et al. (2022), Yang et al. (2022),
(2019), Shahmoradi et al. (2019), Sun et al. (2021), Pérez-Peló et al. (2021), Koc (2022), Sun et al. (2023), Wang et al.
et al. (2018), Li and Liu (2018), Žalik Wan et al. (2020), Belli et al. (2020), (2022)
and Žalik (2018), Cheng et al. (2018), Pourabbasi et al. (2021)
Yuanyuan and Xiyu (2018), Zou et al.
(2019), Ebrahimi et al. (2018), Zhu et al.
(2018), Moradi and Parsa (2019), Chen
and Bi (2019)
Game model Non-cooperative Moscato et al. (2019) Wang et al. (2021) –
Cooperative – Zhou et al. (2020), Ayachi et al. (2021a) –
Page 7 of 47
93
 93 Page 8 of 47
Fig. 2  Evolution of distribu-
tion of WoS-indexed relevant
literature related to community
models in complex information
networks published from Janu-
ary 2018 to June 2023
Fig. 3  Distribution of WoS-indexed relevant literature related to com-
munity models in complex information networks published from Jan-
uary 2018 to June 2023
5 Graph model
An interconnection network is represented as a weighted
graph G(V, E, W) or unweighed graph G(V, E), where V is
the vertex set, E ⊆ V 2 is the edges set and W ∶ E → ℝ is a
weight function.
The adjacency matrix of the graph G, denoted by A, is a
(n × n)-matrix where n = |V|, which is defined as follows:
The rows and the columns of A are indexed by the vertices
of G. If two vertices i and j are non-adjacent then the (i, j)-
component of A is 0, on the other hand, (i, j)-component
is non-zero if i and j are adjacent. We denote (i, j) -com-
ponent of A by Aij . The type of graph G determines the
possible values of Aij . Thus if G is an undirected graph,
then Aij = Aji , ∀ i, j ∈ N = {1, … , n}. Otherwise, if G is
Social Network Analysis and Mining (2024) 14:93
a directed graph than ∃ i, j ∈ N = {1, … , n}, Aij ≠ Aji . If
G is an unweighted graph (resp. a weighted graph) then
∀ i, j ∈ N, Aij ∈ {0, 1} (resp. ∃ i, j ∈ N, Aij > 1). Finally, if
G is a signed graph then Aij ∈ {−w, 0, w}, w > 0.
In Graph model, community structure is defined
as clustering graph ver tices into k subgraphs:
G1 = (V1 , E1 ), … , Gk = (Vk , Ek ) s.t. V = ∪ki Vi . In the case
Vi ∩ Vj = �, ∀i, j ∈ {1, … , k} we have a Graph partitioning,
otherwise, we refer to it simply by Community detection.
In the literature, graph model community detection is
generally used to represent communities in the context of
recommender systems (Deng et al. 2016; Symeonidis and
Mantas 2013) and network security applications such as
Sybil detection (Zhang and Sanjeev 2014; Gao et al. 2018).
Community detection methods in graph-based commu-
nity models may be classified on the basis of the framework
used into three main classes: Graph pattern detection, Spec-
tral clustering and Stochastic approaches. In the following
subsections, we describe each of these frameworks as well
as some of relevant related research works.
5.1 Graph pattern detection
It consists on detecting highly cohesive subgraphs over the
overall sparse interconnection graph. The graph structures
that are commonly used to represent communities in litera-
ture are:
• k-clique Complete subgraph of size k. Palla et al. (2005)
found that overlaps between communities are very com-
mon in complex networks. They defined community as
Social Network Analysis and Mining (2024) 14:93
the union of all k-cliques that can be accessed from each
other through a succession of adjacent k-cliques, where
adjacent k-cliques are k-cliques which share k − 1 nodes.
• N-club Mokken (1979) proposed the concept of N-club to
represent cluster concepts in a graph G. N-club is defined
as a maximal subgraph of G of diameter N.
• k-plex Wang et al. (2017) proposed a modelization of
communities through k-plex. The bounded diameter of
k-plex, and its upper bound size are all good properties
for representing a cohesive community structure. The for-
mal definition of such structure is as follows: G� (V � , E� )
is a k-plex in G(V, E) if:∀v ∈ V � ∶ degin G�
(v) ≥ |V � | − k .
degG′ is the internal degree of v in G , |V | is the cardinal-
in ′ ′
ity of V ′.
• LS-set The concept of LS-set was pioneered by AMI
(1972). The idea is that an LS-set is the union of its sub-
sets, and the result is better than the subsets because it
has less interconnection with the rest of the network.
More formally, G� (V � , E� ) is LS-set of a graph G(V, E)
if ∀u, v ∈ V � and w ∈ V − V � , 𝜆(u, v) > 𝜆(u, w)., where 𝜆
denotes the edge connectivity between two nodes, which
is the minimum number of edges that must be removed
in order to disconnect them.
• k-truss A k-truss of a graph G is the maximal subgraph
such that each edge belongs to at least k − 2 triangles in
this subgraph (Zheng et al. 2017). Zheng et al. (2017)
proposed a novel community model, called Weighted
k-truss community, which is based on the concept of
k-truss. To better characterize community properties, this
model considers the edge weights. Then, the authors pro-
posed a BFS-based online search algorithm for depicting
the top r weighted k-truss communities in O(m1.5 ) time,
such that m is the number of edges in a network.
To depict such graph structures representing communities,
there are two main approaches in literature: deterministic,
and heuristic based approaches.
5.1.1 Deterministic approaches
Deterministic algorithms generate solutions in an iterative
incremental way, such that after a number of repetitions, the
algorithms will converge to an optimal solution. Although,
deterministic algorithms give generally an optimal solution,
they are time-consuming in large datasets cases (Li et al.
2014; Palla et al. 2005).
Li et al. (2014) proposed an algorithm based on maximal
cliques to detect overlapping communities, and the bridge
vertices between them, in the unweighted and weighted
networks. First, all the maximal cliques are depicted using
Depth and Breadth searching. Then, two maximal cliques
may be merged into a larger cohesive subgraph according
to some given rules.
Page 9 of 47 93
On the other hand, Zhang et al. (2014) proposed an
approach based on k-clique clustering to identify the inter-
net opinion leader community. Firstly, the maximum size of
the clique (k) is determined according to the degree of each
node. Then, the k-clique which contains the certain node is
computed. After that, every edge that is neighbored by the
node in the last step is deleted. This step is repeated until
finding all the k-cliques.
5.1.2 Heuristic approaches
Since detecting graph structures such as N-cliques, N-club,
etc. is an NP-hard problem, many heuristic techniques have
been proposed. Heuristic algorithms are dependent on the
problem they are trying to solve. Their solutions are based
on exploitation and exploration concepts for finding optimal
solutions. However, they are usually trapped in local optimum.
In Zhu et al. (2020), proposed a community detection
algorithm called Modularity Optimization with k-Plexes
(MOKP). First, k-plexes are computed using a BS algo-
rithm; these k-plexes are considered as community seeds,
then the remaining nodes are assigned by modularity optimi-
zation. To save computational time, the authors proposed an
improved version of MOKP which is based on reducing the
scale of the network by removing all nodes whose degrees
are less than (z − k), where z is the lower bound of the com-
munity size, and adjusting nodes assignment rules.
In the same scope, Yang et al. (2022) developped an
algorithm called Quadratic Optimization based Clique
Expansion (QOCE) to detect overlapping communities in
very large networks. This algorithm starts by depicting high-
quality maximal cliques and considering them as the initial
seeds. Then, the reminding nodes are affected to the previ-
ously detect seeds by applying quadratic optimization.
Moreover, to overcome the drawbacks of the existing
clique based scheme for community detection, Ramesh and
Srivatsun (2021) proposed a new genetic algorithm based
community detection. They relied on merged-maximal-
clique based representation schemes in order to reduce
chromosomes length with a fewer number of cliques. Fur-
thermore, the operators of the Evolutionary algorithm are
enhanced by renumbering the solutions to avoid redundant
solutions during the execution of the algorithm.
5.2 Spectral clustering
Let G = (V, E, W) be a weighted graph, W its adja-
cency matrix, the (i, j)-component of W represents the
weight of the edge between nodes i, j ∈ V , such that
Wij ≥ 0, ∀ i, j ∈ {1, … , n}, where n = |V|. Consider the
diagonal matrix D = [dij ]n×n , where dij = 0 if i ≠ j and
∑n
dii = j=1 wij is the degree of node vi.
 93 Page 10 of 47
The unnormalized graph Laplacian matrix of G,
L = [lij ]n×n is given by: L = D − W . In the case of an
unweigheted graph, the adjacency matrix is considered
instead of the weighted matrix, i.e. L = D − A. The Lapla-
cian matrix L has the following properties (Von Luxburg
2007):
1 ∑ n ∑n
• ∀x ∈ ℝn ∶ xt Lx = w (x − xj )2 , where xi is
2 i=1 j=1 ij i
the ith component of x.
• L is a symmetric positive semi-definite matrix.
• The smallest eigenvalue of L is 𝜆1 = 0 with the associated
eigenvector 1 = (1, … , 1)t.
In order to solve community detection problem, spectral
graph theory can be an effective method. Indeed, the relaxa-
tion of graph clustering allows the exploration of the eigen-
values and eigenvectors properties of their Laplacian and
adjacency matrices. Spectral clustering approaches can be
classified into three main categories: Two-way partitioning,
k-way partitioning and Relaxation.
5.2.1 Two‑way partitioning
Hogen and Kahngs’ research work (Hagen and Kahng 1992)
was one of the earliest proposals that defined the relation
between the eigenvectors of the Laplacian matrix L of a
graph G and the solution of a two-way ratio cut problem.
Besides that, they found a lower bound of the problem,
𝜆 1
which is 2 such that 𝜆2 is the second eigenvalue of the
n
Laplacian matrix and n is the number of nodes.
Moreover, Zhang and Sanjeev (2014) proposed a two-
way spectral clustering approach to detect Shilling attacks in
recommender systems in the case where the attack profiles
are highly correlated. For this purpose, they modeled the
problem as finding a maximum submatrix in the user-user
similarity matrix. More specifically, the user-user similarity
matrix is translated into a graph. Then, an iterative two-way
spectral clustering algorithm is applied to find the min-cut
solution of the highly correlated group. To ensure the appli-
cability of the approach in the case of unbalanced clustering,
the graph is created based on the edge density.
5.2.2 K‑way partitioning
Considering the graph G(V, E, W), let C = {C1 , … , Ck } be
a set of k subsets of V. We can define Cut edges as a set
C = {(u, v) ∈ E|u ∈ Ci , v ∈ Cj , 1 ≤ i < j ≤ k}. Moreover, the
∑
cut size of C is defined as Θ(C) = w(u, v) , where
(u,v)∈Cut
w(u, v) is the weight of the edge (u, v). The problem of k−
Social Network Analysis and Mining (2024) 14:93
way partition can be formulated as follows: min Θ(C) sub-
ject to Ci ∩ Cj = �, ∀i, j ∈ {1, … , k}.
In this context, the algorithm proposed by Alpert et al.
(1999) is considered being one of the first major research
works which undertook the problem of K-way partitioning.
The idea is to find a good vector partitioning solution
Pk = {P1 , … , Pk } in a set of vectors Y, such that every cluster
Pi , i ∈ {1, … , k} consists of a subset of vectors that sum to a
vector of large magnitude. Thus, the function to be optimized
∑ � �2
is given by the formula: f (Pk ) = kj=1 �Yj � such that
∑ � �
Yi = y∈Pi y. By considering U = [uij ]n×d the matrix whose
columns are the first d eigenvectors of the Laplacian matrix
L of the graph, the authors defined a matrix√ of scaled eigen-
vectors Vd = [vij ]n×d , such that vij = uij H − 𝜆j , where 𝜆j is
the jth eigenvalue of the Laplacian matrix of the graph,
H ≥ 𝜆n, where 𝜆n is the nth eigenvalue. First, S is initialized
to the empty set S = �, then iteratively, the vector ydi ∈ Y that
�∑ �
maximizes � y∈S∪{yd } y� is added to S, removed from Y and
� i �
labeled with vertex in order. Thus, at any stage of the algo-
rithm, S consists of a good vector partitioning subset. The
time complexity of the algorithm is estimated to O(dn2 ).
In the same vein, Symeonidis and Mantas (2013) pro-
posed a multiway spectral clustering approach to provide
friend recommendation. Their approach uses the first few
eigenvectors and eigenvalues of the normalized Lapla-
cian matrix and computes a multi-way partition of the
obtained data. Firstly, the normalized Laplacian matrix
L of the adjacency matrix A is computed as follows:
1
L = D− 2 (D − A) × D− 2 . Then, the k first eigenvectors of
L ∶ u1 , … , ud are computed and stored as columns of a
matrix U. Finally, by considering vectors vi ∈ ℝd , with
i = 1, … , n as the different n lines of U, a k-means cluster-
ing algorithm is applied to the resulting data points v1 , … , vn
in order to find k clusters.
Moreover, Newman (2006) focused on demonstrating
how maximization process of modularity optimization can
be written in terms of the eigenspectrum of a matrix known
as Modularity matrix. This matrix is defined as follows:
Bij = Aij − Pij , where, A is the adjacency matrix of the inter-
connection graph and Pij is the probability that nodes i and
j will be connected by a vertex.
5.2.3 Relaxation
Jiang and McQuay (2012) showed that the maximization of
quantitative functions including Modularity and Modular-
ity density for community detection can be formulated as
a combinatoric optimization problem based on modularity
Laplacian matrix. Furthermore, instead of applying tradi-
tional spectral relaxation, they applied additional non-nega-
tive constraint to the graph clustering problem and proposed
Social Network Analysis and Mining (2024) 14:93
an efficient algorithm to optimize the new objective. With
the explicit non-negative constraint, the proposed solution
converges to the ideal community indicator matrix and can
directly classify nodes into communities. Moreover, the
near-orthogonal columns of the solution can be reformulated
as the posterior probability of nodes belongings to commu-
nities. Consequently, the proposed method can be used to
depict the fuzzy or overlapping communities and thus helps
the understanding of the intrinsic structure of networks.
5.3 Stochastic approaches
Community in interconnection graph can be considered
as a subnetwork in which nodes have higher probability to
form edges with nodes that belong to the same community
than with the other nodes of the network. More formally,
let G� (V � , E� ) be a subgraph of a the graph G(V, E) , Pij is
the probability to form an edge between nodes vi and vj . In
literature, there are two main stochastic models to define
communities (Fortunato 2010):
• Strong stochastic model: G� (V � , E� ) is a strong stochastic
community, if: ∀i ∈ V � , ∀j ∈ V � , ∀k ∈ V − V � ∶ Pij > Pik.
• Weak stochastic model: G� (V � , E� ) ∑ is a weak ∑stochastic
j∈V � Pij
community in G(V, E), if: ∀i ∈ V � , > j∈V−V �
�V � � �V � �
In literature, Stochastic approaches can be classified into two
relevant classes: Random walk approaches and Statistical
inference approaches.
5.3.1 Random walk
Considering the high density of intra-cluster edges, Random
walk model is based on the idea that vertices belonging to
the same community are quickly reachable from each other,
and the random walker has higher probability to stay in the
same community.
So if we consider G� (V � , E� ) a subgraph of G(V, E)
and a random walk of length l that starts at i ∈ V �
(l ≥ diameter(G)), Pj (t) is the probability that the random
walker is in node j at step t, G′ is a community if:
∀j ∈ V � , ∀k ∈ V − V � ∶ Pj (t) > Pk (t).
Yi et al. (2021) proposed a set of algorithms based on a
density sensitive random walk to detect local communities
and avoid both cluster boundary and unbalanced walk issues.
First, the authors defined the concept of graph density infor-
mation which allows the algorithm to identity the node near
the community boundary and the nodes with higher graph
density. For this, they defined the term S(t) as
Page 11 of 47 93
S(t) = g(t)R(t) + (1 − g(t))f (D),
where
f (D) = [f (Dij )],
and
{
N−t
, if 0 < t < N,
g(t) = N
0, otherwise,
{1
P , if 0 < Dij < 2 × davg ,
f (Dij ) = 2 ij
0, otherwise,
D ∈ ℝ|V|×|V| is the density matrix, R(t) is the rate matrix at
the iteration t, g(t)R(t) serves as a reinforcement term and
(1 − g(t))f (D) as the density term, davg is the average node
density. Finally, the iteration of the algorithm is given by:
r(t+1) = 𝛼 Norm(P◦[U + S(t) ]) ∗ r(t) + (1 − 𝛼)r(0) ,
where the operator A◦B is the Hadamard product, U is
|V| × |V| all-one matrix.
In the context of the security field, Gao et al. (2018)
proposed SYBILFUSE algorithm, a defense-in-depth
framework for detecting Sybil attacks. First, the algo-
Pij rithm trains a local classifier (e.g. Support vector machine,
.
Logistic regression, etc.) to compute local trust commu-
nity scores for nodes and edges. Then, it uses a weighted
random walk and a loopy belief propagation mechanism to
propagate the local scores through the network.
Okamoto and Qiu (2022) proposed a formulation to
decompose random walk into localized random walks to
detect pervasive communities. They described pervasive
communities as network communities with no determined
boundaries. These are defined by a conditional probabil-
ity p(n|k) which represents the relative belongingness of
node n to community k. Furthermore, they described the
problem of detecting hierarchical pervasive communities
in the network.
The different research works discussed in this subsec-
tion are just few substantial contributions in the context
of community detection based on Random walk approach.
As described in Fig. 1, the reader can find other relevant
research works published in this context in the following
references: (Li et al. 2018; Wu et al. 2021; Li et al. 2022).
5.3.2 Statistical inference
Contisciani et al. (2022) proposed a probabilistic genera-
tive model based on statistical inference for hypergraph with
overlapping communities. This model provides an efficient
 93 Page 12 of 47
approach to detect overlapping communities. Let H(V, E) be
an hypergraph with V = {n1 , … , nN } and E = {e1 , … , ee };
H(V, E) can be represented as an adjacency tensor A such
that entries An1 ,…,nd represent the weights of a d-dimensional
interaction between the nodes n1 , … , nd . Let 𝜃 = (u, w) be
a set of latent variables, such that u is n × k dimensional
community membership and w is the affinity matrix. The
likelihood of observing the hypergraph given 𝜃 can be mod-
eled as the probability:
∏ A
𝜆e e ∑ ∏
P(A|𝜃) = e−𝜆e , s.t. 𝜆e = wde k uik .
e∈Ω
Ae ! k i∈e
To infer the latent variables 𝜃 = (u, w) given the hypergraph
A, the approach considers both maximum likelihood estima-
tion assuming uniform priors on the parameters and maxi-
mum a posteriori estimation assuming non-uniform priors.
Thus, the algorithmic update for the membership vector is
given by:
∑ original bipartite graph. Moreover, multi-layer net-
e∈E Bie 𝜌ek
uik = ∑ ∏ ,
e∈Ω�i∈e wde k j∈e�j≠i ujk
where Bid is the weight of the hypergraph e to which node
i belongs, and 𝜌 is a variational distribution determined in
the expectation step of the Expectation Maximization EM
procedure. In the same scope, the algorithmic updates for
the affinity matrix is given by:
∑
e∈E�de =d Ae 𝜌ek
wdk = ∑ ∏ .
j∈e ujk
e∈Ω�de =d
Furthermore, Chen and Mo (2022) proposed a stochastic
block model to represent multilayer weighted networks, and
developed a framework based on statistical inference for an
efficient community detection. Their approach used a Vari-
ational expectation-maximization algorithm to estimate the
parameter of interest, such as connectivity strength matrix.
5.4 Concluding remarks and discussion
Table 4 summarizes a comparative study of relevant research
works relative to community detection approaches based on
Graph model.
• Much of the current literature on community detec-
tion pays particular attention on developing algorithms
that deal with undirected unweighted graphs. How-
ever, real interconnection networks can be directed,
bipartite, dynamic, multi-layered, and have weighted
connections or nodes with features. Some research-
ers have developed many approaches for dealing with
such networks, some important examples of these are
Social Network Analysis and Mining (2024) 14:93
the works of Roozbahani et al. (2023) for the case of
multi-layer networks, Chen and Mo (2022) for the case
of weighted multi-layer networks, Sun et al. (2023)
for dynamic networks. Unfortunately, there still little
research directly investigating these issues. The main
reason that research to date has tended to focus on undi-
rected unweighted graphs rather than the other types of
graphs is that many problems of community detection
in the different types of graphs can be translated into
problems of community detection in unweighted undi-
rected graphs. Indeed, a simple common way to deal
with directed graph when searching for communities
is to ignore directionality and assume edge symmetry
(Malliaros and Vazirgiannis 2013). In the context of
community detection, a bipartite graph can be trans-
formed into a non-bipartite graph by multiplying the
corresponding adjacency matrix by its transpose. The
weight between two nodes in the resulting graph is
positively correlated to their Jacquard similarity in the
works describe multi-stranded relationships between
nodes, each type of relationship (trust, citation, simi-
larity, etc.) is described in one simple layer (Kim and
Lee 2015). Thus, community detection for every type
of relationship can be considered as community detec-
tion in a simple network. Finally, to depict communi-
ties in dynamic networks, the majority of approaches
take snapshots of the network topology (Rossetti and
Cazabet 2018), then, the usual community detection
approaches are applied to find communities in the cur-
rent snapshot of the network (static state).
• Another important scenario that could occur in real-
world complex networks is the presence of signed edges
with positive and negative weights, indicating attractive
and repulsive interactions, respectively. Especially in the
case of correlation data and trust/distrust networks (Hos-
seini-Pozveh et al. 2022). Ideal partitions in this case
would have positively weighted intra-cluster edges and
negatively weighted inter-cluster edges. Unfortunately,
few studies have been published for dealing with such
networks. Thus, more research on this topic needs to be
undertaken in depth. Furthermore, signed and directed
graphs are dealt using undirected graphs with computed
weights (Hosseini-Pozveh et al. 2022).
• Graph model for community detection is accurate for
detecting both overlapping and non-overlapping commu-
nities with an acceptable time complexity (mainly poly-
nomial or linear). Furthermore, since that several works
are parallelizable, it would be interesting to use massive
and distributed computing to enhance convergence speed
of the algorithms.
Table 4  Comparative table of characteristics of complex network communities based on Graph model
Classification Works Criteria

Model Framework Approach Community type Links Distribution Complexity Scalability Application
Social Network Analysis and Mining

Graph Pattern detection Deterministic Zhang et al. (2014) Overlapping Undirected Parallelizable O(𝛼 𝛽 ln(n) ), 𝛼 , 𝛽 : fitting parameters Considered Opinions’ analysis
Heuristic Zhu et al. (2020) Partitioning Undirected Centralized Linear Considered Community detection in
complex network
Deng et al. (2016) Overlapping Directed Centralized – Not considered Recommender system
(2024) 14:93

Yang et al. (2022) Overlapping Undirected Distributed ( d3 ) 1∑ Considered Overlapping community

O(d × n × 3 + �S� + n3 ) detction in complex
n s∈S s ,
ns ∶number of nodes in the sampled network
subgraph s ∈ S
Spectral clustering Two-way partitioning Zhang and Sanjeev Partitioning Undirected Centralized O(n3 ) Not considered Sybil/shilling defense
(2014)
K-way partitions Francisquini et al. Partitioning Unidrected Parallelizable O(n2 ) Considered Anomaly detection
(2022)
Symeonidis and Man- Partitioning Undirected Centralized O(n × r) + O(k × M(n)), r: number Considered Friend recommender
tas (2013) of matrices, vector operations, M(n)
: cost of a matrix vector product
Stochastic Random walk Gao et al. (2018) Partitioning Undirected Centralized O(m × r), r: number of iterations Considered Sybil defense
Yi et al. (2021) Partitioning Undirected Parallelizable O(m) Considered Community detection in
complex networks
Okamoto and Qiu Overlapping Undirected Centralized – Not considered Community detection in
(2022) complex networks
Li et al. (2022) Overlapping Undirected Parallelizable log(m) Considered Community detection in
O(m + ) complex networks
𝜖𝛼
Statistical inference Contisciani et al. Overlapping Undirected Parallelizable O(n × h × k) h : maximum hyper- Considered Community detection in
(2022) edge size in the dataset complex networks
Chen and Mo (2022) Partitioning Undirected Parallelizable O(n2 × k2 × l), l : number of layers Considered Community detection in
(weighted) multilayer weighted
complex network

n: number of nodes in the network. D: average degree of nodes. K: number of clusters. m: number of edges. dim: dimension
Page 13 of 47
93
 93 Page 14 of 47 Social Network Analysis and Mining (2024) 14:93

6 Machine learning model fuzzy clustering algorithm iteratively updates the objective
function and the membership matrix u according to the fol-
Machine learning intends to learn optimal solutions from lowing formula, until convergence:
previous experiences E, with respect to community detection
1
task and fitness functions (performance measures), in order uij =
� � m−1
1
.
to improve the performance P with the future experiences ∑�C� (xi , vj )
of classifying new nodes into communities (Mitchell 1997). l=1 (xi , vl )
As machine-learning algorithms could be very accurate
approaches to classify or cluster nodes in complex networks In their paper, Niu et al. (2023) proposed an Overlapping
based on their features in content-based network analysis, community detection algorithm based on adaptive Density
they have several practical real world applications such as Peaks clustering with Iterative partition strategy algorithm
service composition (Gupta et al. 2018), social communities (ODPI). The algorithm uses a customized distance function
detection (Niu et al. 2023; Zhang and Zhou 2020), and trust to measure the distance between each pair of nodes. Thus,
circles detection (Jia et al. 2017). the distance matrix can be computed according to the fol-
1
In this scoop, we distinguish three main frameworks lowing equation: dist(i, j) = , such that dist(i, j) is
ls(i, j) + 𝜖
used for community detection: Unsupervised learning,
the distance between nodes vi and vj and ls(i, j) is the linking
Semi-supervised learning and Supervised learning. In the
s t r e n g t h w h i c h i s g i ve n b y t h e fo r m u l a :
upcoming subsections we describe these three frameworks (lc(i, j) + Aij + Bij ) × (|Vij | + 1)
and illustrate each by some relevant research works. ls(i, j) = , where
min(Ii , Ij )
( ( ))
∑ wipj − maxw
6.1 Unsupervised learning lc(i, j) = wipj × exp − ,
p∈V
r×t+𝜂
ij
Unsupervised learning approaches aim to cluster unlabeled
nodes with no preexisting labels (communities). Unsuper- such that Vij is the set of common neighbors between nodes
vised learning based approaches can be divided into five vi and vj , wipj = min(Aip , Apj ), maxw is the maximum value
main relevant classes: Clustering, Autoencoder, Label prop- of weight, r = maxw − min(A) is the range of weights in A,
agation, Non-negative matrix factorization, Deep non nega- t ∈ [0, 1] controls the influence of common neighbors on the
tive matrix factorization. linking strength, 𝜂 is a small positive number that prevents
the denominator from being equal to zero, Ii and Ij are the
6.1.1 Clustering sums of the weights of the out-edges and in-edges of vi and
vj , respectively, Bij is Jaccard similarity coefficient between
Let V = {p1 , p2 , … , pn } be the set of nodes of a complex vi and vj (Al-Oufi et al. 2012). ODPI algorithm uses an adap-
network where each node pi , i ∈ {1, … , n} is considered tive local density calculation method which is given by the
as a vector of d features: pi = [pi1 , pi2 , … , pid ]t . The aim of following formula:
unsupervised clustering approaches is to partition the set √
√
of nodes V into clusters (communities): C = {C1 , … , Ck } √ 1 ∑ k
dc = √ (𝜃 k − 𝜇k )2 ,
which optimize specific objective functions that measure the N − 1 i=1 i
clustering quality.
In this setting, Lu et al. (2020) proposed an approach where 𝜃ik is the distance between node vi and its kth nearest
for community detection based on a multiple-kernel neighbor, 𝜇 is the mean value of all nodes, and
combination fuzzy clustering constituted of four main 1 ∑
k = max(⌊ degree(vi )⌋, 1) . In addition to that, a
phases. First, random walk probability transition matrix �V� vi ∈V
Pk = [x1 , x2 , … , xn ] is computed in different steps k. Then, cluster center assignment method based the iterative k-means
multiple base kernels are computed. After that, a new kernel clustering algorithm is used. Finally, a strategy for assigning
matrix 𝜃 is calculated by a linear combination; the objective overlapping communities to nodes was proposed. Indeed, for
function to optimize is given by the formula: every node whose neighbors belong to different communi-
ties, the degrees of belongingness to every neighboring com-
∑
N
∑
k
munity is evaluated, given the sequence of community labels
J𝜆 = um T
ij (𝜃(xi ) − vj ) (𝜃(xi ) − vj ), of all nodes in the network: {cl1 , … , cl|V| }. The Affiliation
i=1 c=1
Degree for community c ∈ C of node i is given by the fol-
where uij is the degree of membership of data point pi to lowing equation:
∑�C�
cluster Cj ∈ C , l=1 uil = 1, m is the hyperparameter to con-
trol the membership degree of nodes, m > 0 . Finally, the
Social Network Analysis and Mining (2024) 14:93 Page 15 of 47 93

∑
� p∈KNNj ,clp =c cls(i, p) both the initial graph structure and modularity-based prior
ADci = ls(i, j) ∑ , communities when computing embedding spaces. The steps
cls(j, p)
j∈KNNi ,clj =c p∈KNNj of their proposed method are as follows: firstly, community
membership matrix Ac of the network is computed through
where KNNi is the set of K nearest neighbors of node vi ,
⋃ Louvain algorithm. Then, Ac matrix is s-regular sparsified
c ∈ vj ∈KNNi {clj }. If ADci > 𝜎 ADi i , then node vi will be
cl
in order to obtain a new community membership matrix As
assigned to community c. in which each node in a given community Cl is connected
to only s < nl randomly selected nodes in Cl , where nl is
the number of nodes in Cl . Next, As is combined with input
6.1.2 Autoencoder
graph data, i.e. adjacency matrix A and nodes features matrix
X as follows: (A, X) = (A + 𝜆As , X). After that, the resulting
To reduce the computational complexity, it is often use-
network data are processed by the proposed community-
ful to convert High-dimensional data to low-dimensional
preserving encoders, encoding each node i of the network
codes using Multi-layer neural network. The principle
as an embedding vector zi of dimension d ≪ n. The optimi-
consists of training a Neural network with a reduced cen-
zation of neural weights of encoders is ensured by using both
tral layer whose corresponding data is more adequate for
reconstruction and modularity-inspired losses. Finally, the
clustering, these neural networks should then be capable of
reconstructed graph by the decoder is used for community
reconstructing the initial high dimensional input vectors,
detection, by applying one of the many clustering algorithm
this class of neural networks is known as Autoencoders.
for Euclidean data such as k-means algorithm.
Indeed, Autoencoders (AEs) can depict underlying nonlin-
In the same vein, Zhou et al. (2023) proposed a Community
ear correlations in real networks and detect communities
Detection framework Based on Unsupervised Attributed Net-
from reconstruction. A typical AE (Hinton and Salakhut-
work Embedding (CDBNE) capable of controlling and captur-
dinov 2006) is composed of an encoder H = 𝜙e (A, X) , a
ing the temporal features of a network. This framework jointly
decoder  = 𝜙r (H) or X̂ = 𝜙r (H), and a bottleneck, which
models information about network topology and nodes’ fea-
is the Code hidden layer where the encoding is pro-
tures with the graph attention autoencoder. Then, it combines
duced. The encoder 𝜙e maps high dimensional network
the output with a prior mesoscopic community representation
which is represented by its adjacency matrix A and its
of the network using an Encoder/Decoder. Finally, in order to
possible attributes X into a lower dimensional encod-
obtain a high-quality representation of nodes, a self-training
ing H = [hij ]d×n , where n is the number of nodes in the
clustering module optimizes the representation of the learn-
network, and d << n . The ith column of H, i.e. Hi , rep-
ing process.
resents the features of the node vi in the latent space.
Hi = 𝜎(WH Xi + dH ) , WH ∈ ℝd×n , dH ∈ ℝd are learned
6.1.3 Label propagation
encoder parameters 𝜎(.) is an element-wise non-linear
activation function. The decoder 𝜙r takes the encoding
Let G = (V, E) be a graph, A its adjacency matrix, and ci the
and recreates back the encoder input, i.e. network struc-
label of node vi ∈ V, i ∈ {1, ..., |V|}. Generally, in the con-
ture  or its attributes X̂ . The objective is to maximize the
text of community detection, each node vi is initially labeled
equivalence between input data x and its reconstructed
with a different label ci = i . The principle of Label Propa-
output 𝜙r (𝜙e )(x). This is ensured by minimizing the recon-
gation Algorithm (LPA) consists on iteratively choosing a
struction loss function min L(x, 𝜙r (𝜙e )(x)) which could be
random node vi ∈ V and change its label to a new label c′i
Mean Square Error or Binary Cross Entropy. The main
which is uniformly chosen from the set of the most frequent
idea consists on applying classical clustering algorithms
label in the neighborhood of vi.
such as k-means, Non-negative matrix factorization, etc.
Hosseini-Pozveh et al. (2022) proposed a label propaga-
on the lower dimension matrix H = 𝜙e (A, X) which has
tion based algorithm for community detection in directed
more obvious community structure.
signed social networks. As the available LPA-based methods
Salha-Galvan et al. (2022) proposed a community detec-
do not consider the case of signed directed networks, the
tion method based on enhanced version of Graph Autoen-
authors proposed a method that utilizes the direction infor-
coder (GAE) and Variational Graph Autoencoders (VGAE).
mation to convert the considered signed directed network to
First, they studied the reasons why GAE and VGAE are
an undirected weighted network. In this context, the weight
generally outperformed by other frameworks on commu-
W1,ij of every edge (vi , vj ) from node vi to node vj is computed
nity detection, especially when dealing with networks whose
as follows: if the edge is positive (resp. regative), then:
nodes do not have features. Then, they proposed a commu-
nity-preserving message passing scheme to enhance their
GAE and VGAE encoders, this is ensured by considering
 93 Page 16 of 47
Kiout+ × Kjin+ Kiout− × Kjin−
W1,ij = 1 − (resp. W1,ij = 1 − ),
di+ × di+ di− × di−
where Kiout+ (resp. Kiin+ ) is the positive out-degree (resp.
positive in-degree) of the node vi ; Kiout− (resp. Kiin−) is the
negative out-degree (resp. negative in-degree) of the node
vi ; and di+ (resp. di−) is the positive degree (resp. negative
degree) of the node vi.
Furthermore, W1,ij is combined with another weight W2,ij
computed from the sign information of the edges as follows:
if directed edge (vi , vj ) is positive, then
⎧ Bij − Uij
⎪ if �{N(i), vi } ∪ {N(j), vj }� ≠ 0,
W2,ij = ⎨ �{N(i), vi } ∪ {N(j), vj }�
⎪0
⎩ otherwise,
else, if the edge is negative, then
⎧ Uij − Bij
⎪ if �{N(i), vi } ∪ {N(j), vj }� ≠ 0,
W2,ij = ⎨ �{N(i), vi } ∪ {N(j), vj }�
⎪0 otherwise,
⎩
where, Bij , Uij , |N + (i)|, |N + (j)|, |N − (i)| and |N − (j)| are the
number of balanced triads of edge (vi , vj ), the number of
unbalanced triads of edge (vi , vj ) , the number of positive
neighbors of vi , the number of positive neighbors of vj ,
the number of negative neighbors of vi , and the number of
negative neighbors of vj , respectively. Finally, the authors
extended the label propagation algorithm, where the com-
bined weights W1,ij and W2,ij are applied for a more accurate
community detection in singed directed networks.
In the same vein, Traag and Šubelj (2023) proposed Fast
Label Propagation Algorithm (FLPA) which is based on
the same principles used for label propagation algorithms,
namely, a label ci is associated to each node vi ∈ V in the
network, and a majority update rule is used to update labels
of nodes at each iteration. However, instead of iterating over
all nodes whenever a label is changed, the algorithm only
considers nodes in whose neighborhood a label has been
updated. For this, the algorithm maintains an explicit queue
of nodes Q. After each iteration, if the label ci of the node vi
is changed, some of its neighbors Ni = {vj |(vi , vj ) ∈ E} are
added to the queue Q. Namely, each neighbor vj ∈ Ni whose
label is different from the updated label of vi and does not
yet belong to the queue Q is appended to Q. At each step,
a node is dequeued from Q, the process continues until the
queue is empty.
6.1.4 Non‑negative matrix factorization
Let G = (V, E) be an interconnection graph network and
A its adjacency matrix. Generally, Non-Negative Matrix
Social Network Analysis and Mining (2024) 14:93
Factorization (NMF) based community detection methods
follow this general steps (Liu et al. 2023): first, A is decom-
posed into lower rank non-negative basis matrices A = UX T ,
U ≥ 0 , X ≥ 0 . This decomposition is solved using an opti-
mization algorithm. Then, the graph nodes are assigned to
the communities according to the obtained model as fol-
lows: assuming that the graph has K underlying communities
C1 , … , CK , the algorithm learns  a rank-K approximation of
A, Â = UX T , such that U ≥ 0 is a set of base vectors, X ≥ 0
is a coefficient matrix in which each row represents a node
in the target network. Finally, X can be considered as a soft
threshold indicator that identifies the belongingness of nodes
to communities, i.e. ∀j ∈ {1, … , n} and k ∈ {1, … , K},
xjk = Pr(vj ∈ Ck ), this can be formulated as follows:
∀vj ∈ V ∶ max{xjs |s = 1, … , K} = xjk ⇒ vj ∈ Ck .
Liu et al. (2023) proposed a Constraint-induced Symmet-
ric Non-negative Matrix Factorization (C-SNMF) model
allowing to model undirected network with many latent
feature matrices. In addition to that, the model integrates a
symmetry-regularizer into its objective function in order to
conserve the symmetry property of the low-rank approxima-
tion. Furthermore, to ensure local invariance of the target
network, the model incorporates the graph-regularization.
Thus, the objective function of the model is formulated as
follows:
min F(U, X) =‖A − UX T ‖2F
𝜇
+ ‖UX T − XU T ‖2F + 𝜆tr(X T LX),
2
where, A is the adjacency matrix, X ≥ 0, U ≥ 0 denote the
latent feature matrices, 𝜇 > 0 , 𝜆 > 0 are scale parameters,
‖.‖F is the Frobenius norm, tr(.) computes the trace of a
matrix, L is the Laplacian matrix of A.
In the same scope, Fang and Lin (2022) proposed an algo-
rithm that uses non-negative matrix factorization to detect
overlapping network communities. First, an objective func-
tion qualified by Kullbac-Leibler divergence was proposed,
then, a new form of non-negative matrix factorization was
used to find a solution space.
6.1.5 Deep non negative matrix factorization
Based on the same principle as deep layers in Autoencoders,
Community detection with Deep Non-negative Matrix Fac-
torization stacks multiple layers of NMF {U1 , … , Up }, p > 0
to depict node similarities in different levels. In this context,
Deep Autoencoder-like Non-negative Matrix Factorization
uses an Autoencodeur to insure network reconstruction on
hierarchical mappings (Sun et al. 2017). In this context, the
objective function of community membership Xp > 0 and the
hierarchical mapping {Ui }i ≥ 0 are trained by aggregating
p
Social Network Analysis and Mining (2024) 14:93
both reconstruction loss and 𝜆 weighted graph regulariza-
tion; the 𝜆 weighted graph regularization aims to deal with
topological similarity to cluster neighboring nodes. This
objective function is described in the following equation:
min L(Xp , Ui ) =‖A − U1 … Up Xp ‖2F
Xp ,Ui
+ ‖X − UpT … U1T A‖2F + 𝜆tr(Xp LXpT ),
s.t. ‖.‖F is the Frobenuis norm, L is the graph Laplacian
matrix.
Zhao et al. (2022) proposed a new algorithm based on
Autoencoder Non-negative Matrix Factorization (ANMF)
that considers both structural topology and node features
information. Furthermore, the algorithm allows balancing
the contribution of each information using a flexible param-
eter. Hence, ANMF model tries to minimize the loss func-
tion described in the following equation:
arg min ‖A − WH‖2F + ‖H − W T A‖2F
W,H,Y
�
k Ui ,Vp
+ f (H, Y)‖H T − CY‖2F + 𝛽 ‖Y(∶, r)‖21 ,
r=1
where A is the adjacency matrix, W ∈ ℝn×k +
is a set of base
vectors, H ∈ ℝ+ is the community member matrix (k ≪ n),
k×n
C is the node attribute matrix, Y is the community attribute
matrix, ‖.‖F is Frobenius norm, 𝛽 is a non-negative param-
eter. Furthermore, in order to balance between structural
topology information and node content, the ANMF model
proposes a flexible trade-off function f based on community
modularity. This trade-off function has two variation f1 , f2 ,
which are defined as follows:
f1 (H, Y) = 𝛼|Q(ncl(H T )) − Q(ncl(CY))|,
( )
𝛼
f2 (H, Y) = ,
|Q(ncl(H T )) − Q(ncl(CY)) + 𝜖|
where ncl(H) denotes the node community labels which are
obtained from community member matrix H, ncl(CY) is the
node community labels which are obtained from the product
of node attribute matrix C and community attribute matrix
Y, Q(.) is the modularity function (Chakraborty et al. 2017).
Finally, to find an optimal solution, that is to find: com-
munity membership matrix H, and an optimal community
attribute matrix Y that minimize the value of the loss func-
tion. The ANMF model updates the parameters of the model
(W, H, Y) iteratively and simultaneously. The updating rules
are mainly based on the Block coordinate descent approach
(Jin et al. 2015).
Al-sharoa and Rahahleh (2023) proposed a Deep Robust
Auto-encoder Non-negative Matrix Factorization
(DRANMF) approach for community detection. The
approach considers the average of T-order proximity matrix
Page 17 of 47 93
as an input to the Encoder. A T-order proximity of an adja-
cency matrix A ∈ ℝn×n is defined as follows: ST = S S … S,
⏟⏟⏟
T times
where S ∈ ℝn×n is the first-order proximity matrix, with
Aij , and depicts the local structure of nearest
sij = ∑n
A
j=1 ij
neighbors nodes.
Thus, the average of T-order proximity W ∈ ℝn×n is then
S + S2 + … + ST
defined by the formula: W = , and it depicts
T
the global structure information of the network. In
DRANMF model, the Encoder transforms the average high-
order proximity matrix W to the cluster membership space.
On the other hand, the Decoder restores it. The aim of the
approach is to reduce the distance between the lower-level
and higher level presentation of the network for optimal
community detection. Thus, the objective function for
DRANMF is formulated as follows:
min L = LD + LE + 𝜆Lreg .
The Decoder term is defined by:
min D = ‖W − U1 U2 … Up Vp ‖2,1 , s.t. Ui ≥ 0, Vp ≥ 0, ∀i ∈ 1, 2, … p,
Ui ,Vp
the Encoder term is defined by:
min E = ‖Vp − UpT U2T … U1T W‖2,1 , s.t. Ui ≥ 0, Vp ≥ 0, ∀i ∈ 1, 2, … p,
Ui ,Vp
where Vp ∈ Rk×n is community membership matrix,
Ui ∈ Rdi−1 ×di is the multi-layer mapping, such that, 1 ≤ i ≤ p,
n = d0 > d1 > … > dp−1 > dp = k and di is to the dimen-
sion of the i-th layer, ‖.‖2,1 is l2,1 norm, this norm is chosen
because of its robustness against noise. Finally, the regulari-
zation term is given by the formula:
min Lreg = 𝜆tr(Vp LVpT ),
Ui ,Vi
where 𝜆 is a regularization parameter, L is the Laplacian
matrix of the adjacency matrix of the network, and tr(.)
returns the trace of a matrix.
The discussed works in this subsection are just few illus-
trative examples of community detection approaches based
on Unsupervised learning framework. For further reading on
relevant research contributions on this subject, the following
references can be consulted: (Lei et al. 2019; Gupta et al.
2018; Niu et al. 2023; Gholami et al. 2022) for Clustering
based approaches, Li et al. (2021), Xu et al. (2020), Zhang
et al. (2020), Cao et al. (2018), Wang et al. (2020), Al-
Andoli et al. (2022), Xie et al. (2019) for Autoencoder based
approaches, Malhotra and Chug (2021), Bouyer and Roghani
(2020), Nath et al. (2021), Ding et al. (2018), Li (2019), He
et al. (2019), Deng et al. (2019), Duan et al. (2019), Sat-
tari and Zamanifar (2018a), Sattari and Zamanifar (2018b),
Rostami and Oussalah (2022), Laassem et al. (2022), Fang
et al. (2022), Luo and Xu (2022), Roghani et al. (2021) for
 93 Page 18 of 47
Label propagation based approaches, (Jin et al. 2019), Yan
and Chang (2019), Yan and Chang (2020), Roozbahani et al.
(2023), Shang et al. (2023), Chen et al. (2022) for Non nega-
tive matrix factorization based approaches, and (Wu et al.
2018), Huang et al. (2021), Zhang and Zhou (2020) for Deep
non negative matrix factorization based approaches.
6.2 Semi‑supervised learning
Semi-supervised learning is a special form of classification
in which the amount of unlabeled data is much greater than
the amount of labeled data. Thus, the aim of semi-super-
vised classification is to use unlabeled data points in order to
model a learner that outperforms the ones obtained by using
only the labeled data.
A necessary condition of semi-supervised learning is that
the underlying distribution of the marginal data p(x) over the
input space must contain information about the posterior
distribution p(y|x), such that y is the associated labels of the
data from input space. In the case this condition is satisfied,
the algorithm can use unlabeled data to obtain information
about p(x), and consequently about p(y|x) (Zhu 2006).
In literature, there exist three main classes of semi-super-
vised learning approaches to detect communities in complex
information networks: Generative adversarial network based
approaches, Graph convolutional network based approaches,
and Graph convolutional autoencoder approaches.
6.2.1 Generative adversarial network
Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) approaches aim to
train two neural networks: a Generator 𝜙g and a Discrimina-
tor 𝜙d in the adversarial framework (Goodfellow et al. 2014).
The Generative network (the Generator) 𝜙g takes input
data with a random distribution 𝜙d (x). Then, 𝜙g (z) learns a
generator distribution pg that represents the targeted prob-
ability distribution via input noise variables pz (z). On the
other hand, the Discriminator 𝜙d takes an input data which
could be a true data x whose density is pdata or a generated
one x̂ whose density is pg . If the Discriminator 𝜙d takes
sets of true and generated data in the same proportions, its
expected absolute error can then be expressed as follows:
E(𝜙d , 𝜙g ) =Ex∼Pdata(x) [log𝜙d (x)]
+ Ez∼Pz [log(1 − 𝜙d (𝜙g (z)))].
The aim of the Generator is to deceive the Discriminator
that tries to accurately separate between true and generated
data. Thus, the objective function of a Generative adversarial
network is given by:
Social Network Analysis and Mining (2024) 14:93
min𝜙g max𝜙d E(𝜙d , 𝜙g ).
Zhang et al. (2020) proposed a framework based on a GAN
for learning heuristics for community detection. The algo-
rithm is called Seed Expansion with generative Adversarial
Learning (SEAL). To model a Discriminator that determines
whether a community C ⊂ V is real or generated, the authors
used a Graph Neural Network (GNN) (Scarselli et al. 2008).
The output of the Discriminator consists of the probability
that community C being real, this probability is given by
the formula:
𝔻(C, W) = Pr(C is real |W) = [1 + exp(wT3 z(C))]
̄ −1 ,
where W = {W0 , … , WL , w1 , w2 , w3 } is the set of param-
eters: Wj is the weight matrix of the ith layer of GNN,
w1 , w2 , w3 are vector of parameters; Z(C) ̄ = ∑ z(u) ,
c∉C
and z(u) = [z0 (u), z1 (u), … , zL (u)] is the concatenation
of the representation of nod u at each layer of the GNN.
The Generator aims to generate a local community given
a seed node u0 ∈ V . In this context, the authors used a
Greedy Community Generation algorithm inspired from
Seed Expansion methods (Andersen and Lang 2006); at
each step t of the algorithm, given the actual partial solu-
tion Ct−1 = {u0 , u1 , … , ut−1 }, a node ut is peaked from the
boundary to expand the community Ct = Ct−1 ∪ {ut }, this
expansion is modeled according to a Reinforcement learning
algorithm that uses a policy G(at |u0 , Ct−1 , Q) parameterized
by Q, such that at ∈ A is the next action to take.
Wu and Chen (2020) proposed an algorithm base on GAN
named Graph Sparsification with Generative Adversarial
Network (GSGAN), which aims to sparsify networks in order
to detect communities. GSGAN depicts relatively important
relationships that do not appear in the original graph, adds
artificial edges to represent these relationships, and enhances
the effectiveness of the community detection task. The gen-
erator of the GAN intends to create random walks which can
capture the structure of a network. On the other hand, the
discriminator tries to judge the authenticity of the random
walk, and considers the relationships between the nodes of
the network based on this random walk. Finally, the authors
designed a reward function in order to guide the generator
to produce random walks that embed useful nodes’ relation
information. The different random walks are then aggregated
to construct a new social network that is effective for com-
munity detection task.
6.2.2 Graph convolutional network
Let G = (V, E) be an undirected graph, |V| = n, |E| = m, and
̃ the self looped graph obtained by adding to each
̃ = (V, E)
G
node v in G a self loop. Let A, and à denote the adjacency
Social Network Analysis and Mining (2024) 14:93
matrices of G, and G ̃ respectively, then à = A + In . Let D,
and D ̃ be diagonal degree matrix of G and G ̃ respectively,
then D ̃ = D + In. Consider X = [X1 , … , Xn ]T ∈ ℝn×d as node
feature matrix, such that each line Xi ∈ ℝd is associated with
a node vi ∈ V . The normalized graph Laplacian matrix L
is a symmetric positive semi-definite matrix, defined as
1 1
L = In − D 2 AD 2 where D is the diagonal degree matrix of
A. The eigen decomposition of L is defined by UΛU T , such
that Λ is a diagonal matrix of eigenvalues of L, U ∈ ℝn×n is
a unitary matrix in which each column is an eigenvector of
L. The graph convolution operation between a signal x and a
filter g𝛾 (Λ) = diag(𝛾) is defined as g𝛾 (L) ∗ x = Ug𝛾 (Λ)U T x ,
such that 𝛾 ∈ ℝn is a vector of spectral filter coefficient
(Chen et al. 2020).
In the same vein, Yuan et al. (2023) proposed an approach
based on graph convolutional network to learn the commu-
nity structure of a graph. First, using a two-layer graph con-
volutional network, the node embeddings matrix F with the
maximal Markov stability is computed as follows:
̂ Â X W 1 ) W 2 ),
F = 𝜎(A𝜎(
where W 1, W 2 are the trainable parameters, and 𝜎 is ReLu
activation function. In order to optimize F, the parameters
W 1 and W 2 are iteratively updated depending on the value of
the loss function L which is defined by the Markov stability
as follows:
L = −tr(F T [ΠP(t) − 𝜋 T 𝜋]F),
where 𝜋 is the stationary distribution of the Markov chain,
Π = diag(𝜋), P(t) = M T , and M is the transition matrix. This
process is repeated until convergence. Then, F is converted
to the community affiliation matrix H using a threshold p.
Indeed, if Fuc > p then the node u is considered being in
community c, as consequence Huc = 1 otherwise Huc = 0.
6.2.3 Graph convolutional autoencoder
Some research works introduced Graph Convolutional Net-
works into Autoencoders. Indeed, Autoencoders can be a
good solution to overcome oversmoothing issues and help
to highlight community boundaries. In this context, He
et al. (2022) proposed a semi-supervised approach based
on Graph Convolutional Autoencoder (GCAE) to detect
overlapping communities in an attributed graph G(V, E).
First, they proposed a version of GCAE that consists of an
Encoder and a Decoder. The Encoder aims to learn hidden
representation H of G, it is based on a multi-layer graph
convolutional network with the following propagation rule:
H (l) = 𝜎(D
1 −1
̃ 2 H (l−1) W (l) ),
̃ 2 Ã D
Page 19 of 47 93
where à = A + I , A is the adjacency matrix, D̃ is the diago-
nal degree matrix of à , W (l) is the weight matrix of the lth
layer, 𝜎 is the activation function which is defined as
𝜎(x) = ReLU(x) = max(0, x) for all layers except the last
exi
layer where the function 𝜎(xi ) = Softmax(xi ) = ∑ x is
ie
i
used. On the other hand, the Decoder is used to reconstruct
à , an approximation to the original adjacency matrix A from
H, where every element à ij in à represents the probability
that two nodes vi and vj are connected:
1
Pr(Ãij = 1) = sigmoid(Hi HjT ) = ,
1 + exp(Hi HjT )
where Hi is the ith column of the matrix H. In order to meas-
ure the reconstruction loss between A and à , binary cross
entropy is used:
1 ∑
L=− log Aij Pr(Ã ij = 1)
n2 ij
+ (1 − Aij ) log(1 − Pr(Ã ij = 1)).
Then, to allow H to indicate the community belongingness,
Newman modularity maximization is used (Newman 2006).
Finally, semi-supervised learning module is proposed in
order to incorporate Y, the known community belongingness
of some nodes. This can enhance the accuracy of community
detection in the network. In this context, crossentropy loss
is used as the semi-supervision loss:
∑∑
k
Ls = − Yij ln(Hij ),
i∈Y j=1
where Y is the set of labeled nodes.
De Santo et al. (2021) proposed a Semi-supervised
approach for community detection based on Convolutional
Neural Networks (CNN). Their main approach was to simul-
taneously depict different features of an interconnection
network, such as topological characteristics and contex-
tual information. First, they feed the CNN input layer by
a two-dimensional user-to-user matrix whose components
could represent many types of information such as similar-
ity, friendships, and so forth. Segments of this adjacency
matrix are extracted by considering individual rows. Indeed,
each row is transformed into a two-dimensional matrix. The
result is a set of n adjacency matrices, where n is the number
of users in the network. Each matrix represents adjacency
relationships (similarity, friendships, trust, etc.) between a
given user and the rest of the network. The idea consists on
representing network connections over a particular sparse
matrix using SparseConv2D algorithm. Then, the different
convolution operations are performed just around the non-
zero components.
 93 Page 20 of 47
6.3 Supervised learning
Let Dl = {(x1 , y1 ), … , (xl , yl )} be a set of l labeled data
points. In the context of community detection, each data
point (xi , yi ) consists of a labeled node xi ∈ ℝd in the net-
work, where d is the number of features, and an associated
label yi which represents the community to which the node xi
belongs. Based on the set Dl , known as the training dataset,
supervised learning approaches aim to infer a classifier that
could predict accurately the label (the community) ŷ of each
new input unlabeled featured node x̂ . Another set of labeled
nodes (data points) is called test dataset on which the clas-
sifier is evaluated.
Supervised learning framework in the context of com-
munity detection includes five main approaches: Nearest
neighbors, Support vector machine, Recurrent neural net-
work, Deep reinforcement learning, and Convolutional neu-
ral network.
6.3.1 Nearest neighbors
K Nearest Neighbors (K-NN) is a simple, supervised learn-
ing algorithm that can be efficient in classifying nodes
into communities. In complex information networks,
every node in the network is represented by a vector of
its features values. Given a training set of network nodes
xi ∈ Dl , Dl ⊂ ℝd , |Dl | = l , every node xi ∈ Dl is associated
with its community label yi ∈ {1, … , M}. Then, to classify
any unlabeled node in the network xj ∉ Dl, its distances from
the data points of the training set Dl are computed. Then,
the K nearest neighbors are selected and xi is assigned to the
community containing the maximum number of its nearest
neighbors.
In this sense, Jia et al. (2017) proposed a community
detection algorithm called KNN-enhance that adds the K-NN
graph of node attributes to mitigate the issues of the sparsity
and the noise effect (false edges) of the network. Indeed, by
adding an edge between nearest neighbors having common
features, the resulting attribute-enhanced network shows a
more strengthened community structure. In addition to that,
a community detection approach such as K-rank-D (Li et al.
2015) could be applied to depict communities in the result-
ing network.
Furthermore, Shang et al. (2017) proposed a labeling
algorithm that combines the K-NN and a label propagation
algorithm. The algorithm iteratively labels a node in a net-
work using the labels of its adjacent nodes and their index of
closeness, which allows to automatically generate sub-com-
munities. Then, it uses mutual membership of two adjacent
sub-communities in order to eventually merge them. Finally,
a refinement strategy is proposed to update labels of some
incorrectly classified nodes at communities boundaries.
Social Network Analysis and Mining (2024) 14:93
6.3.2 Support vector machine
Given a training set Dl = {(xi , yi )}li=1 , xi ∈ ℝd , yi ∈ {−1, 1},
the Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier takes the form
of y(x) = sign[wT Φ(x) + b], such that Φ ∶ ℝd → ℝm , (m ≥ d)
is a non-linear function that maps an input space to a higher
dimensional feature space, b is bias term. To evaluate the
SVM classifier, the following optimization problem is
∑l
defined: min L(w, 𝜉) = 12 wT w + c k=1 𝜉k subject to:
w,b,𝜉
{
yk [wT Φ(x) + b] ≥ 1 − 𝜉k , ∀ k ∈ {1, … , l},
𝜉k ≥ 0, ∀ k ∈ {1, … , l},
where 𝜉 aims to allow misclassifications due to overlapping
distribution, and c ≥ 0 is a tuning parameter. The minimi-
zation of ‖w‖2 corresponds to maximization of the margin
(separating distance) between the two classes y = +1 and
y = −1.
In the context of community detection, Sui et al. (2016)
introduced an SVM based algorithm to detect communities
in networks. The feature vector xi ∈ ℝd of a node vi is
obtained from the transformation of topological information
of the network. Thus, the jth feature of the feature vector xi
relative to node vi is computed by the formula:
1
xij = k )+1
, where d(v, v� ) is the length of the short-
d(vi , Vmax
est path in the network form node v to node v′ and Vmax k
is
maximum node of k-degree. This proposed algorithm pre-
dicts community structure of a network based on a little
amount of test data. This is a useful trait, since a genuine
complex network is sparse and does not have many connec-
tions between its vertices.
In the same vein, Nema and Pandey (2015) proposed an
approach for detecting community kernels in large social
networks based on both SVM and community kernels
classification.
6.3.3 Recurrent neural network
In Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) approaches (Sutsk-
ever et al. 2014), given a sequence of input data instances
(x1 , … , xT ), the sequence of outputs (y1 , … , yT ) is computed
as follows:
ht = 𝜎(W x xt + W h ht−1 ),
yt = W y ht ,
where W x , W h and W y are weight matrices of the RNN, and
ht is the state transition function at state t.
The RNN can map input sequences to output sequences
when the alignment between the inputs and the outputs is
known. However, when the input and the output sequences
have different lengths, it would be more convenient to use
Social Network Analysis and Mining (2024) 14:93
Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) Neural Networks (Sut-
skever et al. 2014). LSTM aims to estimate the conditional
probability Pr(y1 , … , yT � |x1 , … , xT ) such that (x1 , … , xT )
is an input sequence, and (y1 , … , yT � ) is its corresponding
output sequence.
�
∏
T
Pr(y1 , … , yT � |x1 , … , xT ) = Pr(yt |v, y1 , … , yt−1 ),
t=1
such that v is the fixed dimensional representation of the
input sequence (x1 , … , xT ) which is given by the last hidden
state of LSTM.
In this context, Ali et al. (2023) proposed a new frame-
work based on graphs and Long Short Term Memory Gated
Recurent Units (LSTM-GRU) to detect hate contents in social
network. In addition to that, they described a new approach to
depict hate contents communities. First, they developed anno-
tated data to train the model and detect communities. Then,
the authors proposed various models based on customized
LSTM and RNN for classifying tweets. Within this scope, they
combined LSTM with GRU algorithms and arranged layers in
order to allow the approach to recognize text patterns. Indeed,
a user who shares a hate content tends to retweet offensive
contents. This information was extracted and the graph estab-
lished. Finally, hate-spreading communities were detected
from the trained LSTM-GRU graph model using the Girvan-
Newman algorithm (Girvan and Newman 2002).
6.3.4 Deep reinforcement learning
In Reinforcement Learning (RL), we distinguish two main
elements: the agent and the environment. The agent oper-
ates in the environment and is responsible for taking actions
which can change the environment, and getting rewards for
each chosen action. This reward can have a positive or a
negative value. More specifically, at each instant t, depend-
ing on the environment dynamics, the agent receives a state
s(t) ∈ S from a state space S and decides to take an action
a(t) ∈ A from an action space A, following a predefined pol-
icy 𝜋(a(t) |s(t) ) (i.e. a mapping from state s(t) to action a(t) ).
Thus, the agent receives a scalar reward rs,a (t) defined by a
reward function:
R ∶ S × A → ℝ,
(s(t) , a(t) ) ↦ R(s, a) = rs,a
(t)
, first model of Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) for
and makes a transition to the next state defined by the state
transition probability Pr(s(t+1) |s(t) , a(t) ). The steps of rein-
forcement learning are iterated until the agent reaches a
terminal state.
In this context, Costa and Ralha (2023) proposed an archi-
tecture called Actor-Critic Community Detection (AC2CD)
for community detection in large dynamic social networks.
Page 21 of 47 93
AC2CD is based on deep reinforcement learning, it uses
the message-passing feature of Graph Attention Network
(Velickovic et al. 2017) to propagate the labels of the differ-
ent communities. The approach chosen for the Reinforce-
ment Learning is Actor-Critic (A2C) method, which aims to
optimize simultaneously the policy and the value function
with proximal policy optimization described by Schulman
et al. (2017).
6.3.5 Convolutional neural network
Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) (Yu et alo. 2014) is a
type of Feed-Forward Deep Neural Network which is very
adequate for grid like topology data. A CNN has two main
types of hidden layers: the Convolution layers and Pool-
ing layers. A convolution layer aims to depict patterns from
local regions of the input data xk , by computing the feature
map yk using linear convolutional filter w followed by a non-
linear activation functions f, such as: ReLU, tanh, sigmoid,
etc. as follows:
yk = f (xk ∗ w).
On the other hand, a pooling layer aims to transform the
feature map into a more convenient representation that pre-
serves only relevant information and discards irrelevant one.
This insures robustness to cluster, invariance to distortions,
and a more compact representation. Within this scope, there
are mainly two pooling methods: Max Pooling and Average
Pooling. The Max Pooling selects the largest value in its
input Pooling Region Rij around a position (i, j). The output
ykij of the Max Pooling related to the kth feature map and the
region Rij is defined as follows:
ykij = max xkpq .
(p,q)∈Rij
While the Average Pooling computes the kth feature by
using the arithmetic mean of the elements in its input pool-
ing region Rij , as described in the following equation:
∑
1
ykij = x ,
|Rij | (p,q)∈R kpq
ij
such that xkpq is the kth component of the point (p, q) ∈ Rij.
In this context, Xin et al. (2017) proposed one of the
community detection. Every node i in the network is rep-
resented by a feature vector vi ∈ ℝn , where n is the number
of nodes. Every component vij , j ∈ {1, … , n} of the vector vi
takes a value between 0 and 1 and is given by the formula:
vij = e𝜎(1−s) if the node j is reachable from i within at least
s steps (1 < s < s0 ), note that 𝜎 ∈ [0, 1] is an attenuation
parameter. The obtained feature vector is than transformed
into a 2-dimensional w × h (s.t. w × h = n ) matrix without
 93 Page 22 of 47
altering the adjacency relations of nodes. The first convolu-
tional layer of the CNN has c1 convolutional kernels. Each
kernel is represented as w� × h� matrix. Once the convolu-
tional operation is applied over the social network, a feature
map can be obtained as follows:
( w� −1 h� −1
)
∑∑
vnxy = 𝜎 bW + Wij Pn(x+i)(y+j) ,
i=0 j=0
where Pn(x+i)(y+j) is the entry value of position (i, j), Wij is the
weight at position (i, j) of the convolutional kernel W and bW
is the bias. Thus, the first convolutional layer maps every
node to c1 feature maps. The last layer is a fully connected
layer consisting of K output neurons, where the value of K
is the number of communities. The value of the kth output
neuron of node n (denoted as okn ) is defined as follows:
f f
okn = 𝜎(bk + Wk qcn1 .c2 ),
where qn1 2 is the output of the second convolutional
c .c
layer, Wk represents the weights in the full connection
f
layer, and bk is its the bias. To learn the model param-
f
eters P = (W, W f , b, bf ), the CNN uses back-propagation.
Indeed, let {(Sn , In ) ∶ 1 ≤ n ≤ T} be a set of T training
examples, such that Sn is the adjacency relation of a node
n, In = (In1 , In2 , … , Ink ) is the labels vector of a node n, where
Ini ∈ {0, 1}, ∀i ∈ {1, … , k} and represents whether or not a
node n belongs to the ith community. The cost function is
given by the formula:
1� 1 �� k
T T K
J(P) = ‖on − In ‖2 = (o − Ink )2 ,
2 n=1 2 n=1 k=1 n
J(P) is optimized by back-propagation.
On the other hand, Cai et al. (2022) proposed MFF-Net,
a Multi-Feature Fusion Network for community detection.
This approach intends to overcome feature representation
issue which is due to the limitation of manual definition of
relationship between nodes and local feature representations
of edges. For this, the authors first propose to use only local
features of the edges. Then, they consider both local and
non-local relationships of the edges through nodes’ neigh-
borhood and random walk nodes’ sequence. After that, in
order to classify edges, they introduced a quantitative rela-
tionship between nodes by converting the local and non-
local feature representations into grayscale images. Finally,
and more importantly, the authors proposed a CNN-based
local and non-local feature fusion scheme to enhance the
performance of edge classification.
Social Network Analysis and Mining (2024) 14:93
6.4 Concluding remarks and discussion
Table 5 describes a comparative study of some relevant
research works relative to community detection approaches
based on Machine learning model.
• Machine learning approaches are very powerful for
detecting communities based on network node features.
However, the lack of access to real complex network data
such as logs may be more restrictive compared with the
other approaches that relay only on the graph informa-
tion. This can be mitigated by using the in-the-cloud
preprocessing (convolution, encoding, etc.) to prepare
the data for classification while making the data more
confidential for a human being.
• Even though unsupervised machine learning seems to
be the predominant framework for community detection
based on Machine learning model, the lack of informa-
tion could be a major constraint. Indeed, as there are
numerous forms of interaction, node features, etc. logs
and networks datasets will always lack of critical infor-
mation for automatically training an accurate predictive
model.
• Though supervised learning based approaches may seem
to be more relevant in classifying nodes into known
classes (communities), labeling data is an expensive
task, as it may require in many cases experienced human
annotators.
• Another point to note is that the majority of approaches
based on Machine learning model that are used in com-
munity detection are time-consuming. In fact, their time
complexities are generally quadratic (Niu et al. 2023),
polynomial of higher degree (Lu et al. 2020) or even
exponential (Gupta et al. 2018). Thus, they could pre-
sent convergence time issues when dealing with large
networks, which is a common challenge in the big data
era. Nevertheless, the majority of approaches are either
distributed or parallelizable. In this context, massive
computing, parallelization and distributed computing
on the cloud seems to be worthwhile solutions.
7 Multi‑objective optimization model
Let Φ = {C1 , … , Cm } be a set of all feasible clustering solu-
tions in a complex networks. Multi-objective optimization
aims to find a solution that optimizes some predefined cri-
teria known as fitness functions.
In the case of single criterion, community detection
can be formulated as a single objective optimization prob-
lem (Φ, 𝜌), where 𝜌 ∶ Φ → ℝ is the fitness function which
Table 5  Comparative table of characteristics of complex network communities based on Machine learning model
Classification Works Criteria
Model Framework Approach Com- Links Distribu- Complexity Scalability Application
munity tion
type

Machine Unsuper- Clustering Gupta et al. (2018) Parti- Undirected Distrib- O(ndim×k+1 ), dim: dimension Considered Service composition
learning vised tioning uted
Lu et al. (2020) Overlap- Undirected Paralleliz- O(r × n3 + p × n2 + n2 kt), p : membership Considered Community detection
ping able degree, t : number of the fuzzy clustering in complex networks
Social Network Analysis and Mining

algorithm iterations, r : number of steps

in the random walk
Niu et al. (2023) Overlap- Undirected Paralleliz- O(N 2 ) Considered Community detection
ping able in social networks
Gholami et al. (2022) Overlap- Undirected Central- – Not consid- Social circle detection
(2024) 14:93

ping ized ered in social networks

Autoen- Al-Andoli et al. (2022) Overlap- Undirected Parallel – Considered Community detection
coder ping in complex network
Salha-Galvan et al. Parti- Undirected Paralleliz- Linear complexity Considered Community detection
(2022) tioning able in complex networks
Zhou et al. (2023) Parti- Undirected Paralleliz- O(T1 (k × logm + n × F × DIM + m × DIM) Considered Community detection
tioning able +ndimi k + T2 (n × k + nlogn), dimi ∶ in complex network
dimension of the ith layer, F : number of
attributes, DIM = max(dimi )
Label Rostami and Oussalah Parti- Undirected Paralleliz- O(n) Considered Community detection
propaga- (2022) tioning able in social network
tion Laassem et al. (2022) Parti- Undirected Paralleliz- O(nm) Considered Community detection
tioning able in complex network
Fang et al. (2022) Parti- Undirected Paralleliz- O(n + m) Considered Community detection
tioning able in complex networks
Luo and Xu (2022) Parti- Undirected Paralleliz- O(nd) Considered Community detection
tioning able in complex network
Hosseini-Pozveh et al. Parti- Directed ̄
Paralleliz- O(mt + m(d)log( ̄
(d))), t : number of itera- Considered Community detec-
(2022) tioning (signed) able tions tion in signed social
network
Traag and Šubelj Parti- Undirected Paralleliz- Near linear Considered Community detection
(2023) tioning able in complex networks
Page 23 of 47
93
Table 5  (continued)
93

Classification Works Criteria

Model Framework Approach Com- Links Distribu- Complexity Scalability Application
munity tion
type
Page 24 of 47

Non- Liu et al. (2023) Parti- Undirected Paralleliz- Quadratic with the number of nodes Considered Community detection
negative tioning able in complex network
matrix Roozbahani et al. Overlap- Directed Paralleliz- O(n × l × m × k2 ), l : number of layers in Considered Community detection
factoriza- (2023) ping able multilayer network in multi-relational
tion networks
Huang et al. (2021) Parti- Undirected Paralleliz- – Considered Community detection
tioning able in complex networks
Fang and Lin (2022) Overlap- Undirected Paralleliz- O(n2 × log(n)) Considered Community detection
ping able in complex networks
Shang et al. (2023) Parti- Undirected Paralleliz- O(T(mk + bk)), b : number of 1 in attribute Considered Communiy detection in
tioning able matrix complex networks
Chen et al. (2022) Parti- Undirected Central- O(n2 k) Not consid- Community detection
tioning ized ered in complex networks
Deep non- Zhang and Zhou (2020) Parti- Undirected Paralleliz- O(m(ta + tb )(n2 S + nS2 )), S : max size of Scalable Social circles detection
negative tioning able all layers, ta ∶ number of iterations for
matrix convergence, tb ∶ number of iteration for
factoriza- updating stage factorization
tion Zhao et al. (2022) Parti- Undirected Paralleliz- Complexity of one iteration: O(n2 k + nkt), Not consid- Community detection
tioning able n : number of nodes, k : number of com- ered in attributed graphs
munities, t : number of node attribute
Al-sharoa and Rahahleh Parti- Undirected Paralleliz- O(l(tp + tf )(n2 d + Sl2 ))tp tp : number of Considered Community detection
(2023) (2023) tioning able iteration in training step, tf ∶ number of in complex network
iteration in the fine-tuning step, S : maxi-
mum layer size, l : number of layers
Semi-super- Generative Zhang et al. (2020) Overlap- Undirected Paralleliz- – Considered Community detection
vised Adver- ping able in complex networks
sarial Wu and Chen (2020) Parti- Undirected Paralleliz- – Considered Community detection
Network tioning able in complex networks
Graph con- Yuan et al. (2023) Overlap- Undirected Paralleliz- – Considered Community detection
Social Network Analysis and Mining

volutional ping able in complex network

network
Graph con- He et al. (2022) Overlap- Undirected Paralleliz- O(mfd1 d2 … dk + n2 k), f : size of attributes Considered Community detection
volutional ping able sets, di ∶ internal degree of community i in attributed graph
autoen-
coder
(2024) 14:93
Table 5  (continued)
Classification Works Criteria
Model Framework Approach Com- Links Distribu- Complexity Scalability Application
munity tion
type

Supervised Neighbor Jia et al. (2017) Parti- Undirected Central- O(n × dim × 𝛼), dim:dimension,𝛼 : hyperpa- Considered Community detection
based tioning ized rameter in complex networks
Shang et al. (2017) Parti- Undirected Paralleliz- – Not consid- Community detection
tioning able ered in complex networks
Social Network Analysis and Mining

SVM based Nema and Pandey Parti- Undirected Central- O(n3 ) Not consid- Social trust circle
(2015) tioning ized ered detection
Sui et al. (2016) Parti- Undirected Central- – Not consid- Community detection
tioning ized ered in complex networks
Recurrent Ali et al. (2023) Parti- Undirected Paralleliz-
– Considered Community detection
(2024) 14:93

Neural tioning able in social network

network
Deep Rein- Costa and Ralha (2023) Patition- Undirected Paralleliz- – Considered Community detection
forcement ing able in dynamic social
learning network
Convolu- Cai et al. (2022) Parti- Undirected Paralleliz- O(n3 ) Considered Community detection
tional tioning able in complex networks
neural
network

n: number of nodes in the network. D: average degree of nodes. K: number of clusters. m: number of edges, dim: dimension
Page 25 of 47
93
 93 Page 26 of 47
intends to find an optimal clustering solution C∗ ∈ Φ as
follows:
𝜌(C∗ ) = min 𝜌(C).
C∈Φ
In the case of multicriteria, community detection can
be formulated as a multi-objective optimization prob-
lem (Φ, P) of finding a possible dominant solution C∗ ,
where P = (𝜌1 , … , 𝜌k )T is a vector of k competing crite-
ria functions that should be simultaneously optimized,
𝜌i ∶ Φ → ℝ, i ∈ {1, … , k}. More formally, the aim is to find
a dominant clustering solution C∗ ∈ Φ, where:
𝜌i (C∗ ) = min 𝜌i (C), ∀i ∈ {1, … , k}.
C∈Φ
Since generally a dominant solution does not exist, Pareto
optimality is used to find clustering solutions. Given
C1 , C2 ∈ Φ , we say that C1 dominates C2 , denoted as
C1 ≺ C2 , if and only if:
∀i ∈ {1, ..., k} ∶ 𝜌i (C1 ) ≤ 𝜌i (C2 ) ∧ ∃j ∈ {1, … , k} ∶ 𝜌i (C1 ) < 𝜌i (C2 ).
Multiobjective optimization generates a set of non-domi-
nated solutions, called Pareto front Π:
Π = {C ∈ Φ ∶ ∄C� ∈ Φ with C� ≺ C}.
Then, the Pareto front Π is presented to an expert of the
domain on which community detection is applied to select
the most suitable solution.
In the context of multi-objective optimization, there are
two main frameworks currently adopted in research litera-
ture: Hierarchical framework and Meta-heuristic frame-
work. In the following subsections we describe these frame-
works and discuss some of relevant related research works.
7.1 Hierarchical
The objective of Hierarchical approaches is to detect a hier-
archical community structure of a network. In the context of
community detection, we distinguish two main approaches
in literature: Divisive and Agglomerative.
7.1.1 Divisive
Generally, these approaches follow three main steps: first,
a weight Wij is computed for every pair of nodes vi , vj in
the network. These weights represent connection tightness
between nodes or distance (like similarity). Then, the whole
network is considered as a global community. After that, the
edges are taken off from the network, one by one, accord-
ing to their weights, starting by the edges with the lowest
weights or the highest. With this removing of the edges,
a hierarchy of decreasing size of connected components is
Social Network Analysis and Mining (2024) 14:93
incrementally formed. These components represent the hier-
archical community structure of the network.
Within this scope, Girvan and Newman (2002) proposed
an algorithm for detecting a hierarchical community struc-
ture of a network. First, betweenness centrality is computed
for every edge in the network, betweenness centrality of an
edge (vi , vj ) is defined as the number of shortest paths in the
network that contain the edge (vi , vj ). Then, iteratively, the
edges are removed one by one from the network, starting
with the ones with the highest betweenesses, and after each
removal the betweenesses are recomputed for every affected
edge. This process is repeated until no edge remains in the
network.
Li et al. (2019) proposed a hierarchical community detec-
tion approach based on edge-weighted similarity. First, a
directed social network is constructed by considering
directed fellowship relationship, vertices in this initial net-
work are presented by interest vectors. Then, this network is
converted into a new one that includes undirected weighted
edges. After that, weights are computed by the direction,
the interest vectors, and the similarity between edges. Next,
communities are detected by a hierarchical clustering algo-
rithm based on the edge-weighted similarity. Finally, the
number of communities is detected by the partition density.
7.1.2 Agglomerative
The agglomarative approaches depict the ascendant hier-
archical community structure of a network. As in divisive
approaches, a weight function W maps every edge (vi , vj )
to a real number Wij which represents connection close-
ness between the pair of nodes (vi , vj ) . Generally, these
approaches start by considering every node as a separate
community. Then, the communities are iteratively merged
according to some specified criteria. As the algorithm is
executed a set of increasingly expending connected compo-
nents are gradually constructed. These components represent
the hierarchical communities.
In this vein, Blondel et al. (2008) proposed Louvain
heuristic, a modularity based agglomerative approach for
community detection. The Louvain algorithm has two
phases, which are repeated iteratively. In the first phase,
each node of the network is assigned to a different com-
munity. Then, iteratively, some nodes are removed from
their communities and inserted into different communities.
These actions are determined by evaluating the gain of
modularity (Newman 2006) obtained by making such per-
mutations. This step is repeated until no further improve-
ment is possible. The second phase consists in construct-
ing a new network from the community structure obtained
from the first phase. Hence, nodes belonging to the same
community obtained in the first phase are merged into a
single node. Edges between nodes are the sum of the edges
Social Network Analysis and Mining (2024) 14:93
connecting nodes from the same different communities.
Self-loops are generated by summing all edges inside a
given community. The two phases are repeated until no
more changes are possible and a maximum of modularity
is attained.
The main challenge of the sequential Louvain approach
is how to deal with large-scale graphs. Thus, many
researchers have proposed several parallel Louvain meth-
ods (Que et al. 2015). However, these methods suffer from
two main drawbacks: latency in the information synchro-
nization and communities swap (Blondel et al. 2008). To
overcome these drawbacks, Blondel et al. (2008) proposed
a new graph partition algorithm for the parallel Louvain
method. The idea consists in dividing the graph into iso-
late sets, which are defined as follows: let G(V, E) be a
graph network, a subset of nodes s ⊂ V is called an isolate
set, if ∀vi , vj ∈ s and vi ≠ vj , N + (vi ) ∩ N + (vj ) = �, such that,
N + (v) is the dependency set of v ∈ V , N + (v) = {v} ∪ N(v),
N(v) is the set of neighbor nodes of v, the vertices in the
isolate sets are somehow decoupled from others. Finally,
the algorithm computes and synchronizes information
without latency and communities swap.
For further reading on the subject of community detec-
tion based on Agglomerative based multi-objective optimi-
zation approaches, many other substantial contributions in
this context can be found in the following research works
(Lalwani et al. 2015; Qie et al. 2022; Zhao et al. 2023; Liu
and Ma 2019; Haq et al. 2019).
7.2 Metaheuristic
Community detection is an NP- problem. Thus, research
works generally opt for approximating solutions. These
solutions are found using approaches based on gen-
eral algorithmic structures which can be easily adapted
to solve variety of optimization problems. These are
known as Metaheuristics. Community detection based on
Metaheuristic framework uses three relevant classes of
approaches: Evolutionary inspired, Nature inspired, and
Swarm inspired.
7.2.1 Evolutionary inspired
An evolutionary algorithm is defined as 8-tuple
EA = (I, 𝜌, Ω, Ψ, S, 𝜄, 𝜇, 𝜆), such that I is a space of potential
individuals representing clustering solution, 𝜌 ∶ I → ℝ is the
fitness function to optimize, Ω = {𝜔𝜃1 , … , 𝜔𝜃k |𝜔𝜃k ∶
I 𝜆 → I 𝜆 } ∪ {𝜔𝜃0 ∶ I 𝜇 → I 𝜆+𝜇 } is a set of probabilistic genetic
operators, namely mutations and crossovers, such that each
operator 𝜔𝜃i is controlled by a set of parameters 𝜃i ⊂ ℝ ,
Page 27 of 47 93
S ∶ I 𝜆 ∪ I 𝜇+𝜆 → I 𝜇 is a selection operator where 𝜇, 𝜆 ∈ N
and 𝜆 ≥ 𝜇 , 𝜇 is the number of parent individuals, 𝜆 is the
number of offspring individuals, 𝜄 ∶ I 𝜇 → {true, false} is ter-
mination criterion, Ψ = So𝜔𝜃i o … o𝜔𝜃i describes steps of
1 o
transforming population through population sequence:
Pop(0),Pop(1), Pop(2), … , Pop(n) ∈ I 𝜇 s.t.
Pop(t + 1) = Ψ(Pop(t)), ∀ t ≥ 0.
Malhotra (2021) proposed a Hybrid Genetic Algorithm with
Link Strength-based local search strategy (HGALS) for
community detection. This method tries to optimize modu-
larity function using genetic algorithm. First, initial popula-
tion is represented by string encoding, i.e. each solution is
encoded as C = [c1 , c2 , … , cn ], where ci ∈ {0, 1, … , k − 1}
represents community number of node vi, n denotes the num-
ber of nodes in the graph and k the number of communities.
The initialization of the population is based on the safe and
balanced initialization approach described by Guerrero et al.
(2017). Furthermore, HGALS algorithm uses the border
exchange crossover operator (Guerrero et al. 2017), such that
the nodes belonging to two different communities exchange
their community labels in the solution representation. This
exchange depends on the number of external connections
of each node to the other communities. Moreover, the algo-
rithm uses a neighbor-based mutation operator (De Nooy
et al. 2018) to explore better solution set. Finally, HGALS
uses link strength-based local search operator, which merges
different communities to obtain a reduced set of more opti-
mized ones. This local search allows a correct affectation of
nodes to the communities in which they have a tight bonding
with other nodes.
Bello-Orgaz et al. (2018) proposed Multi-Objective
Genetic Algorithm for Overlapping Community Detection
(MOGA-OCD). The algorithm uses phenotype-type encod-
ing that is based on edge information. Therefore, in a chro-
mosome (a solution) a position (allele) i represents the edge
ei and its value is randomly selected from its adjacent edges.
MOGA-OCD tries to maximize two objective functions:
the first objective function is based on internal measures
(Density, Triangle Participation Ratio, Clique Number and
Clustering Coefficients) and it ensures the maximization of
the internal edge density of communities. On the other hand,
the second objective function is based on external measures
(Expansion, Separability and Cut Ratio), this objective func-
tion aims to minimize inter-community connections. The
MOGA-OCD algorithm iteratively selects two individuals
(chromosomes) from the n-best individuals, then it performs
one-point crossover (Umbarkar and Sheth 2015) operations
over them. Finally, it selects randomly some individuals
from the new generated ones and using predefined mutation
probability, mutations are performed over them.
 93 Page 28 of 47 Social Network Analysis and Mining (2024) 14:93

7.2.2 Nature inspired authors redefined it into a discrete framework for commu-

nity detection. In this context, the nutrient function (fitness
Many metaheuristic optimization approaches based on function) chosen to be optimized is the modularity function
nature phenomena for community detection have been pro- (Newman 2006). The evolutionary aspect of the bacterial
posed in literature, namely, Simulated annealing, Firefly foraging was developed from a topological perspective. In
algorithm, Geography-based algorithm, etc. (Amiri et al. addition to that, two local updating rules, the greedy strat-
(2013), Zhang et al. (2020)). egy and the stochastic strategy, were proposed to adjust the
In this context, Zhang et al. (2020) introduced the positions of the swarm of bacteria into the favored regions.
Whale Optimization-based Community Discovery Algo-
rithm (WOCDA) as a new community detection approach. 7.2.3 Swarm inspired
WOCDA consists in four mains steps that simulate the
humpback whale hunting behavior: an initiation technique To optimize an objective function f, let consider a
and three operations, shrinking encircling, spiral updating, swarm with M particles. At iteration t, for each particle
and random searching. The final goal is to detect an optimal pi ∈ {p1 , … , pM }, a position vector xit = (xi1 (t) (t) T
, … , xin ) and
community structure of the network by optimizing the fol- a velocity vector v(t) = (v(t)
, … , v(t) T
) are defined. At each
i i1 in
lowing fitness function: (t) (t)
iteration t, xi and vi are updated through each dimension
∑
k
2𝜆L(Vi , Vi ) − 2(1 − 𝜆)L(Vi , V̄i ) j ∈ {1, … , n}, following these two equations:
D𝜆 = , {
i=1
|Vi | v(t) [j] = v(t) [j] + c1 r1(t) (pbesti [j] − xi(t) [j]) + c2 r2(t) (gbest [j] − xi(t) [j]),
i i
xi(t+1) [j] = xi(t) [j] + v(t+1) [j],
where Vi , i ∈ {1, ..., k}, is the set of nodes of Gi , a subnet- i

work of G which represents the ith community, L(Vi , Vi ) is where pbesti is the ith particle’s best position that optimizes
the inner degree of Gi , L(Vi , V̄i ) is the outer degree of Gi , the objective function f, gbest is the best position found until
𝜆 ∈ [0, 1] is a parameter used to explore the network at dif- the current iteration t, c1 and c2 are random parameters.
ferent resolutions. To begin, a new initialization method In this setting, Rahimi et al. (2018) proposed a new
based on label diffusion and label propagation is proposed multi-objective community detection approach based on
in order to produce a high-quality initial solution. For this, a modified version of Particle Swarm Optimization called
the label of each node vi in the network is set as li = i . Then, MOPSO-Net. The objective criteria to be optimized are ker-
a pair of nodes are picked by a binary tournament selection nel k-means (KKM) and ratio cut (RC). The kernel k-means
(Eremeev 2018). After that, their labels are assigned to the is given by the following equation:
neighbors using label diffusion approach. Finally, the algo-
rithm updates all the labels according to label propagation ∑
m
L(Vi , Vi )
KKM = 2(n − m) − ,
strategy. This process is defined by the following equation: |Vi |
i=1
∑
li = argmaxi 𝛿(li , lj ), where n is the number of nodes, m is the number of com-
j∈Γ(i) munities, Vi is the set of nodes of the subnetwork Gi from
where Γ(i) is the neighboring nodes of vi , and 𝛿(li , lj ) = 1 if the global graph G, L(Vi , Vi ) is the inner degree of Gi , |Vi | is
li = lj , and 𝛿(li , lj ) = 0 if li ≠ lj. the cardinal number of Vi . On the other hand, the ration cut
Then, using label propagation, a shrinking encircling pro- (RC) is described by the equation:
cess was proposed to update the current node’s label with ∑
m
L(Vi , V̄i )
the label of its most neighboring nodes. This operation is RC = ,
|Vi |
executed |Pse × N|, such that Pse denotes the probability of i=1

executing the shrinking encircling operation and N is the
number of nodes. Then, the one-way crossover operator
establishes a spiral update operation to maintain excel-
lent communities. Finally, a random searching operation is
built to randomly select the label of a neighboring node and
update the label of the present node in order to improve
global search capabilities.
In the same vein, Yang et al. (2022) proposed a new Bac-
terial Foraging Optimization method to detect communities
in networks. As the bacterial foraging algorithm was origi-
nally used for continuous optimization (Das et al. 2009), the
where L(Vi , V̄i ) is the outer-degree of Vi . Finally, to enhance
the general PSO approach, MOPSO-Net changed the mov-
ing strategy of particles. Thus, to move toward personal best
pbesti , each particle pi , i ∈ {1, … , M} executes a two-point
crossover with its personal best. Then, the eventual dominant
solution is selected as temporary position of the particle.
However, if no solution dominates the other, an output with
the highest Normalized Mutual Information value (NMI)
Social Network Analysis and Mining (2024) 14:93
(Amelio and Pizzuti 2015) is selected as temporary position.
To move toward the global best position gbest , a two-point
crossover between its temporary position and the global best
is executed. The two resulting outputs are compared together
to specify the new position of the global best.
In the same scope, Sun et al. (2023) proposed a Core
Node Knowledge Based multi-objective Particle Swarm
Optimization (CNPSO) for dynamic community detection.
First, core nodes are obtained by computing the resistance
distance between every pair of nodes vi , vj as follows:
rij = (L−1 )ii + (L−1 )jj − 2(L−1 )ij ,
such that L is the Laplacian matrix of the network graph G,
and L−1 is the general inverse of L. Then, nodes associated
with these cores will construct the constant communities
according to the connections to other nodes in the network.
The constant community are considered as prior knowledge
from the previous iteration (time stamp) and is used for
inserting operations in the current iteration. To ensure the
quality of detected community structure at each iteration and
the smoothness of two consecutive time steps, a new updat-
ing approach of particle parameters is proposed, which is
based on the optimal individual at the previous iteration, and
the population at the current time step. As in MOPSO-Net
(Rahimi et al. 2018), the CSNPSO algorithm uses Kernel
k-means (KKM) and Ration Cut (RC) as objective functions.
In this subsection, we discussed some pertinent research
works published in the context of community detection
using Metaheuristic based multi-objective optimization
framework. Many other substantial contributions in this
context can be found in the following research references
(as schematized in Fig. 1): (Ebrahimi et al. 2018; Cheng
et al. 2018; Zou et al. 2019; Yuanyuan and Xiyu 2018; Li
and Liu 2018; Žalik and Žalik 2018; Pattanayak et al. 2019;
Shahmoradi et al. 2019; Reihanian et al. 2023; Shen et al.
2022; Shang et al. 2022; Zhu et al. 2018; Moradi and Parsa
2019; Chen and Bi 2019; Zhang et al. 2020; Su et al. 2021;
Ma et al. 2021; Wan et al. 2020; Belli et al. 2020; Pourab-
basi et al. 2021) for the case of Evolutionary inspired multi-
objective optimization based approaches, Koc (2022) for the
case of Nature inspired multi-objective optimization based
approaches, and Sun et al. (2018), Li et al. (2019), Trip-
athi et al. (2021), Wang et al. (2022) for the case of Swarm
inspired multi-objective optimization based approaches.
7.3 Concluding remarks and discussion
Table 6 summarizes a comparative study of relevant research
works relative to community detection approaches based on
Multi-Objective Optimization model.
Page 29 of 47 93
• The comparative study presented in Table 6 highlights
that even though many research works using a single
type of interaction (simple networks with one layer) were
dedicated for optimal static graph partitioning, further
investigation would be necessary to dive into overlapping
community detection problem, multilayer networks, and
dynamic networks.
• Another point, is that the majority of Multi-objective
optimization based approaches are time-consuming.
Thus, even though they are competitive or even better
than many other frameworks in terms of accuracy, they
are not adequate for very large networks, which is a very
common issue in the big data era. Consequently, it would
be important to take advantage of parallel aspects of the
majority of multi-objective approaches in order to accel-
erate the computation time.
8 Game model
Game theory is an abstract mathematical model which
describes many scenarios in which decision-making of
players is influenced by the decisions of others. Every game
involves three main concepts: a set of players, a set of strate-
gies and utility function that quantifies the payoffs of each
player depending on the strategies chosen by the players
involved in the game. Game theory can be an efficient mod-
elization tool for many applications, such as multi-objective
clustering (Badami et al. 2013), intrusion prevention in wire-
less network (Shamshirband et al. 2014), signal processing
(Bacci et al. 2015), etc. The game theory model for commu-
nity detection focuses on three main issues (Jonnalagadda
and Kuppusamy 2016):
• The formulation of payoff function (utility function),
• The game framework used by the agent (nodes): coopera-
tive, non-cooperative,
• The game theoretic solution concepts used to solve com-
munity detection problem: Nash equilibrium in the case
of cooperative game, or Shapley value and Core value in
the case of cooperative games.
In the context of community detection in complex networks,
two main frameworks are generally used for community
detection: Non-cooperative game and Cooperative game.
Both of the two framework are discussed in the following
subsection. Furthermore, some relevant research works have
been described.
 93 Page 30 of 47
8.1 Non‑cooperative game
Communities formation in complex networks can be mod-
eled as Non-cooperative game Γ = (N, (Si )i∈N , (Ui )i∈N ) such
that: N = {1, 2, … , n} is the set of selfish players, repre-
senting the set of network’s nodes. Each player i ∈ N has
a strategy space Si constituted of different strategies that
can play, where each played strategy defines its possible
belonging community(ies). Ui ∶ S = Πni=1 Si → ℝ is the util-
ity payoff function of the player i ∈ N , which computes the
expected income that the player i gets when a strategy profile
s ∈ Πni=1 Si is played by the whole players (each player has
played one of its strategies).
The game is played among the nodes until an equilib-
rium is reached, generally Nash equilibrium is considered.
The notion of Nash equilibrium, proposed by Nash in 1950
(Nash Jr 1950), is a situation such that no player has an
interest in deviating alone from the situation obtained.
Formally, s∗ = (s∗1 , … , s∗n ) ∈ S is a Nash equilibrium, if
∀ i ∈ N, ∀ s�i ∈ Si ∶ Ui (s∗i , s∗−i ) ≥ Ui (s�i , s∗−i ) , where s∗−i is a
strategy profile played by the other players other than i, i.e.
s∗−i = (s∗1 , … , s∗i−1 , s∗i+1 , … , s∗n ). The strategy profile s∗ corre-
sponding to this situation is a community structure solution
of the given network.
In literature, there are mainly four types of approaches
based on No-cooperative games for community detection
in complex networks: Potential games, Graphical games,
Iterative games, and Strategic games.
8.1.1 Potential games
In this framework, for each player i ∈ N , a gain function
𝜙i ∶ S × Si → ℝ is defined to quantify the gain/loss of the
utility of the player i induced by changing alone its strat-
egy. Thus, a single potential function Φ is defined to quan-
tify incentive of every player to change alone its strategy
(its belonging community(ies)). Within this scope, given a
strategy profile s ∈ S , for every player i ∈ N and an alter-
native strategy s�i ∈ Si:
𝜙i (S, s�i ) = Φ(s) − Φ(s−i , s�i ) = ui (s−i , s�i ) − ui (s).
In other words, if a player i ∈ N switches from its initial
strategy si to another strategy s�i ∈ Si in order to increase its
payoff, then the value of the potential function Φ decreases
by the same amount (Monderer and Shapley 1996).
In this setting, Chen et al. (2010) introduced a Potential
game-theoretic framework to resolve the overlapping com-
munity detection issue in social networks. They modeled
the dynamics of communities construction as a potential
game: each node in the network is considered as a self-
ish player who selects which communities to join or leave
according to a utility measurement. A community structure
Social Network Analysis and Mining (2024) 14:93
consists of an equilibrium of this game. They computed the
players’ utility by the combination of a gain function and a
loss function. The gain function is based on the personal-
ized modularity concept and a loss function that reflects the
intrinsic costs incurred when players change strategies by
joining some communities. Thus, given a strategy profile
s = (s1 , … , sn ) ∈ S , the personalized modularity function of
a player i ∈ N is given by the following equation:
1 ∑ dd
̂ j) − i j |Si ∩ Sj |),
Qi (s) = (Aij 𝛿(i,
2m j∈N 2m
where m is the number of edges in the network, Si is the strat-
egy of the player i, 𝛿(i,
̂ j) = 1 if |Si ∩ Sj | ≥ 1 and 𝛿(i,
̂ j) = 0
otherwise.
8.1.2 Graphical games
A Graphical game (N, (Si )i∈N , (Ui )i∈N ) is presented as a
graph G = (V, E), such that V = N and (i, j) ∈ E if the util-
ity function of the player i depends on the strategy chosen
by the player j and inversely. Thus, ∀i ∈ N , its utility func-
tion is ui ∶ Πj∈(N(i)∪{i}) Sj → ℝ such that N(i) is the set of
neighbors of i in the graph G. This model is appropriate
for presenting games in which players influence directly
the outcomes of only a subset of players in the game.
Based on this framework, Narayanam and Narahari pro-
posed a novel graphical game theory inspired approach to
detect communities in social networks (Narayanam and
Narahari 2012) in a decentralized way. First, they set up
a community detection game with a utility function for
each node that is fully dependent on its neighborhood. In
other words, the utility function for each node is entirely
reliant on local knowledge about that node’s egocentric
network. This utility function for a node i is described by
the following equation:
Ti (S)
ui (S) = di (S) + f (di (S)),
Cd2 (S)
i
where di (S) is the number of neighbors of the node i in the
community S, Ti (S) is the number of pairs of neighbors of
the node i in S that are connected themselves, f(.) is a linear
weight function, and Cd2 (S) is the 2-combination from di (S).
i
The authors demonstrated that the suggested utility function
ensures the presence of a Nash equilibrium. Then, they pro-
posed a decentralized algorithm based on this approach for
detecting clusters in social networks, called Nash Stability
based Community Detection (NASHCoDe). First, an initial
partition of the graph in which nodes are clustered into
groups of three nodes is defined. After that, nodes are
ordered in a non-decreasing sequence of their degree. Then,
Table 6  Comparative table of characteristics of complex network communities based on Multi-objective optimization model
Classification Works Criteria
Model Framework Approach Community type Links Distribution Complexity Scalability Application

Multi-objective Hierarchical Divisive Girvan and Newman Partitioning Undirected Centralized O(m2n ) Not considered Social circle detection
(2002)
Agglomerative Lalwani et al. (2015) Partitioning Undirected Distributed O(n log(n)) Considered Recommender system
Qie et al. (2022) Patitioning Undirected Distributed O(t(2n + m)), t : num- Considered Community detection in
ber of iterations complex networks
Social Network Analysis and Mining

Zhao et al. (2023) Patitioning Undirected Centralized – Not considered Dynamic community
detection derived from
the daily rhythms of
human mobility
Metaheuristic Evolutionary Malhotra (2021) Partitioning Undirected Parallelizable O(Ps .k.(n + e) + n.d), Considered Community detection in
Ps: population size, C: complex networks
(2024) 14:93

number of communi-
ties
Bello-Orgaz et al. Overlapping Undirected Parallelizable O(n) Considered Community detection in
(2018) complex networks
Reihanian et al. (2023) Overlapping Unidirected Parallelizable – Considered Social communities in
social networks with
node attributes
Shen et al. (2022) Partitioning Undirected Distributed – Considered Community detection in
complex networks
Shang et al. (2022) Overlapping Undirected Parallelizable O(n2 × PSno × PSno × t), Considered Community detection in
PSno ∶ population size complex networks
in non-overlaping
partitions, PSo ∶ popu-
lation size in overlap-
ping partitions, t :
number of iterations
Page 31 of 47
93
Table 6  (continued)
93

Classification Works Criteria

Model Framework Approach Community type Links Distribution Complexity Scalability Application

Nature inspired Zhang et al. (2020) Partitioning Undirected Parallelizable O(n × dim), dim: nodes’ Considered Community detection in
dimension complex
Page 32 of 47

Yang et al. (2022) Partitioning Undirected Parallelizable Three parts: Chemo- Considered Community detection in
taxis computation: complex networks
O(Nc Sn + Nc SNs m)
Reproduction
computation:
O(Nc Sm + Nc Sn)
Eliminaton-dispersal
computation:
O(Nc Nned n) Nc ∶
number or chromaticx
steps, Ns ∶ number
of bacteria, Nned ∶
number of elimination
dipersal
Koc (2022) Partitioning Undirected Parallelizable – Considered Community detection in
complex networks
Swarm inspired Rahimi et al. (2018) Partitioning Undirected Parallelizable – Considered Social circle detection
Tripathi et al. (2021) Partitioning Undirected Parallelizable – Considered Community detection in
complex networks
Sun et al. (2023) Partitioning Undirected Parallelizable O(maxgen × t × (m + n) × n, 2 )Considered Community detection
t : maximum number in dynamic complex
of iteration networks
Wang et al. (2022) Partitioning Undirected Parallelizable O(m + n) Considered Community detection in
complex networks

n: number of nodes in the network. D: average degree of nodes. K: number of clusters. m: number of edges, dim: dimension
Social Network Analysis and Mining
(2024) 14:93
Social Network Analysis and Mining (2024) 14:93
the nodes are browsed iteratively, and if a node can improve
its utility by changing its group to another neighboring one,
the node is moved. The algorithm stops if there is no node
that can improve its utility by changing its strategy.
8.1.3 Iterative games
To detect overlapping communities in social networks,
Alvari et al. (2011) proposed two frameworks named
PSGAME and NGGAME based on Iterative game and struc-
ture equivalence to consider the formation of overlapping
communities in social networks. Each node of the network is
considered as an agent trying to form coalitions with mem-
bers whose structures are equivalent to it. The PSGAME
approach uses Pearson correlation into the game theory
framework, whereas, NGGAME makes use of neighborhood
relation and adjacency relationships as similarity measure to
compute similarities between graphs in the game framework.
8.1.4 Strategic games
Hajibagheri et al. (2012) proposed a new approach called
Genetic Algorithm Diffusion Model (GADM) for detecting
communities in networks. This approach is based on Infor-
mation diffusion model and Potential game. Thus, each node
of the graph is considered as a rational agent trying to maxi-
mize its Shapley value based on the information it receives.
The Nash equilibrium of the game reveals the community
structure of the graph.
8.2 Cooperative game
Given interconnection graph G(V, E), a community struc-
ture emergence can be modeled as a Cooperative game
(Coalitional game) Γ = (N, v) in which N is a set of players,
known as the grand coalition, that represents the nodes of
the graph, v is a characteristic function from the set of all
possible coalitions of players 2|N| to their payoffs. Depend-
ing on the nature of the function v, two types of games are
defined: cooperative game with transferable utility (TU) and
cooperative game with non-transferable utility (NTU). The
game played is a TU game, if v is a valued function in ℝ, i.e.
one player can transfer a part of its payoff to another player
from the same coalition. In a NTU-game, the function v
assigns to each coalition a feasible set of payoff vectors.
The game continues until no player changes coalitions and
the reached state reveals the community structure to adopt.
In literature, we distinguish three main classes of
approaches that are based on Cooperative games for commu-
nity detection in complex networks: Super additive games,
Partition function games, and Influence games.
Page 33 of 47 93
8.2.1 Super additive games
A game Γ = (N, v) is Super additive if for every disjoint
coalitions S, T ⊂ N ∶ v(S ∪ T) ≥ v(S) + v(T). In this context,
Zhou et al. (2013) proposed an approach that incorporates
network topological structure information and individuals’
attribute information through Super additive cooperative
games. They introduced Super additive game to support stra-
tegic decision-making to recognize communities in dynamic
and heterogeneous social networks. In this cooperative game
based approach, the Shapley value is used to assess users’
preferences and contributions to a certain coalition, as well
as the coalition’s relationship tightness. Then, they provided
an iterative algorithm for computing the Shapley value in
order to increase computation efficiency.
8.2.2 Partition function games
In Partition function games, the value of a coalition S does
not depend only on its members, but it has a strong depend-
ence on the way in which the players of the set N − S (the
players not belonging to S) are structured, i.e. it depends on
the partition of N which is put in place at any time of the
game.
Within this scope, Ayachi et al. (2021a), Ayachi et al.
(2021b) studied the problem of Horizontal Cloud Feder-
ation Formation (HCFF) in the case where a set of man-
ager clouds initiate simultaneously a formation of several
horizontal cloud federations with a set of subordinate
clouds without overlapping. They modeled the situation
as a Partition Function Game (PFG) without transferable
utility (C, V), where C = {C1 , … , Cn } is the cloud set,
V ∶ (S, Π) → V(S, Π) is a function which assigns a value for
each coalition S, such that S ∈ Π, Π is the coalition structure
of C. V(S, Π) = (𝜙1 (S, Π), … , 𝜙|S| (S, Π)), and 𝜙i (S, Π) is the
gain of the ith individual of the federation.
To compute the gain function 𝜙i (S, Π) of the ith indi-
vidual, let consider the production costs pCi (S) of virtual
machines provided by Ci to S, the cost vi (S) paid by Ci to sat-
isfy the client request, and revi (S), the revenue of Ci obtained
from the federation S. Then:
{
revi (S) − vi (S) if i is a manager cloud,
Φi (S, Π) =
vi − pCi (S) otherwise.
8.2.3 Influence games
Let G = (V, E) be a graph. The Influence game of G is a cou-
ple (G, vG ), where vG is a characteristic function that assigns
to every coalition S ⊂ V a number vG ∶ 2N ⟶ ℝ, such that
 93 Page 34 of 47
vG (S) is the sphere of influence of nodes of S (Szczepański
et al. 2015).
In their framework called Cooperative Game Theory-
Based Algorithm for Overlapping Community Detection
(CGTA), Zhou et al. (2020) considered the process of com-
munity detection as an influence game model, in which each
node is acting as a player and communities as game coali-
tions. In addition to that, based on cooperative game theory,
an overlapping community detection is provided. Further-
more, an edge weight calculation for computing Shapley
value of nodes and coalition is proposed, and an optimal
income strategy for every player is described. The different
coalitions may be merged to prevent small size communities
by selecting coalitions that can increase the value of their
characteristic function. This approach does not require any
prior knowledge about the number or size of communities,
and the overlapping community structure is stable at the end
of the algorithm.
8.3 Concluding remarks and discussion
Table 7 is a comparative study of some research works about
community detection approaches based on Game theory
model.
The comparative study shown in Table 7 reveals the fol-
lowing points:
• In literature, most research works about community
detection using game theoretic methods are limited to
small-scale networks (mainly social graphs). However,
the majority of real complex information networks are
very large, and many available game theoretic algorithms
have high time complexity and cannot be good solutions
for community detection in real-world graphs databases
in big data environments. Hence, it would be interesting
to study how for instance, the parallelism and the distrib-
uted computing can improve and enhance things in this
setting.
• As in the case of graph model, the majority of research
works about community detection based on game theo-
retic model are limited to the undirected networks case.
However, assuming the directed network as undirected
induces loss of graph relational information. This could
induce node classification errors. Thus, it would be inter-
esting if hybrid game theoretic models could be devel-
oped to detect both edge density and feature similarity
communities in the directed network case.
Social Network Analysis and Mining (2024) 14:93
9 Classification proposal of community
applications in complex information
networks
As explained in the previous sections, up to now, there is
no unique formal consensual definition of a community in
real complex information networks. This is mainly due to
its wide range of applications. Indeed, community detec-
tion is used in many information network applications such
as depicting common features among nodes, optimizing
time and memory complexities in big data environment.
In this section, we review the five common community
applications in complex information networks found in
literature: Collaborative filtering, Friend recommenda-
tion, Sybil defense, Web community, Service composition
communities.
As result, Table 8 and Fig. 4, depict the distribution of
most relevant works published mostly in the last decade
about community detection in complex information network.
9.1 Collaborative filtering
In collaborative filtering, we consider a set of n users
U = {u1 , u2 , … , un }, a set I of m items I = {i1 , … , im }, and
for each user ui ∈ U , a subset Iui ⊂ I of items which the user
ui has already rated. Given an active user ua ∈ U , the aim of
collaborative filtering is to find items with highest utility
argmaxR(ua , ik ) to the user, where R(ua , ik ) is the rating of
ik ∈I
the user ua of the item ik . Let G(V, E) be a graph representing
trust network between users, where V = U , and
∀u1 , u2 ∈ V, (u1 , u2 ) ∈ E if u1 trusts u2. For every active user
ua ∈ V , we denote by TC(ua ), a subgraph of G(V, E), as the
trust community of ua . Based on the fact that users tends to
rely on their friends’ recommendations, Collaborative filter-
ing approaches examine the ratings of the users belonging
to the targeted user ua social/trust communities TC(ua ) ⊂ U
in order to predict ua ’s preferences over the given set of
items I, and then generate high quality recommendations.
Within this scope, Lee and Ma (2016) presented a hybrid
approach of collaborative filtering which is based on both
user preferences and trust information. User preferences
consist of co-rating similarities between users which are
computed using Jaccard coefficient and its variants (Al-Oufi
et al. 2012). On the other hand, trust information means
direct or indirectly inferred trust relationships between users.
Moreover, the approach relies on both trust and distrust links
and studies their propagation effects on recommendation
accuracy.
For further investigation on community detection applied
to Collaborative filtering applications, Table 9 classifies rel-
evant research works published since 2010. This classifica-
tion is established according to the models and frameworks
Social Network Analysis and Mining (2024) 14:93 Page 35 of 47 93

Table 7  Comparative table of characteristics of complex network communities based on Game theoretic model
Classification Works Criteria
Model Framework Approach Community Links Distribution Complexity Scalability Application
type

Game Non-cooper- Potential Chen et al. Overlapping Undirected Parallelizable O(S), S: Considered Social circle
ative (2010) number of detection
all possible
strategies
Iterative Alvari et al. Overlapping Undirected Parallelizable O(S), S: Considered Social circle
(2011) number of detection
all possible
strategies
Strategic Hajibagheri Partitioning Undirected Parallelizable O(tn + Cnd), Considered Social circle
et al. (2012) t: number detection
of runs,
C: number
player
selection
Cooperative Super addi- Zhou et al. Overlapping Undirected Parallelizable O(mn4 ) Considered Social circle
tive (2013) detection
Partition Ayachi et al. Partitioning Undirected Distributed – Considered Coalition
function (2021a, of virtual
2021b) machines
of fed-
eration and
subordi-
nate clouds
Influence Szczepański Overlapping Undirected Parallelizable O(n2 + nm) Considered Social circle
et al. (2015) detection;
Friend
recom-
mender
Zhou et al. Overlapping Undirected Parallelizable O(n) Considered Social circle
(2020) detection;
Friend
recom-
mender

n: number of nodes in the network. D: average degree of nodes. K: number of clusters. m: number of edges, dim: dimension

that define our proposed taxonomy described in Fig. 1 of
Sect. 4. Note that all the empty frameworks and models have
been left out from the table.
What stands out in Table 9 is that Game model of com-
munities is scarcely used in the context of Collaborative
filtering applications. Furthermore, it shows the predomi-
nance of Unsupervised learning approaches over the other
frameworks. Also, the table reveals that Multi-objective opti-
mization models of communities are more frequently used
in Collaborative filtering than Graph model.
9.2 Friend recommendation
Let G(V, E) be the graph describing an online social network
where V is the vertex set that represents the users and E ⊂ V 2
is the set of edges that denote social relationships (trust,
friendship) between users. Let vi , vj ∈ V , (vi , vj ) ∈ E means
that vi and vj are friends. Complex online social networks are
generally sparse structures which means that an online social
network usually represents a small part of user’s potential
online social circles. The friend recommendation problem
can be formalized as a probabilistic model. Indeed, given
an active user va ∈ V , and a set N(v ̄ a ) of non-adjacent users
of va , i.e. ∀vj ∈ N(va ) ∶ (va , vj ) ∉ E . The aim is to evaluate
̄
the probability that a friendship between a user vj ∈ N(v ̄ a)
and va will be formed and eventually to recommend vj as
a potential friend to va . Based on user vj ’ s reputation in
the social circle of va and the relations in the considered
social network, detection of dense social communitie(s) of
va would help to assess the probability of a future friendship
relation even though there have not been any prior interac-
tion between them.
 93 Page 36 of 47
In this context, Akbari et al. (2013) proposed a friend
recommendation system based on Artificial Bee Colony
(ABC) which recommends new friends among users within
the social network. The approach relies on some topologi-
cal information of communities in social networks to pro-
pose relevant features for relationship in the network. These
topological information are: the egocentred social circle of
the targeted user, the number of shared friends, the density
of links between the set formed by all the neighbors of the
targeted user and the candidate user, and finally, the number
of common friendship circles to which both the targeted user
and the candidate user belong to.
For further reading on community detection applied to
Friend recommendation, Table 10 gives a summarizing clas-
sification of pertinent research works published since 2010
according to models and frameworks described in our pro-
posed taxonomy (see Fig. 1 of Sect. 4). All the frameworks
and models with no published works have been left out from
the table.
It is apparent from Table 10 that few frameworks of com-
munity detection have been used in the context of Friend
recommendation application. Indeed, Game theory model
has not been used. Also, the majority of works applying
communities on Friend recommendation are based on
Unsupervised learning framework. However, fewer works
have used Stochastic framework of Graph model and Meta-
heuristic framework of Multi-objective optimization model.
9.3 Sybil defense
Let G(V, E) be a graph representing a complex network,
where V is the vertex set that denotes the different interacting
entities and E ⊆ V 2 the edge set that figures any pear-to-pear
relationship (friendship, trust, etc.) between nodes. Let A be
the (n × n)-adjacency matrix of G(V, E), where n = |V|. We
consider C ⊂ V as a set of malicious nodes that emulate the
behaviors of real nodes in order to form an adversary subvert
network. Generally, Sybil nodes tend to form edges between
each others in order to merge in the network and gain influ-
ence in it. On the other hand, an edge between a true node
and a Sybil node is generally harder to form, as the trust
value between them is generally low. Thus, the search of the
Sybil nodes set C ⊂ V consists in finding a bottleneck cut Φ
in the graph, which∑is a cut (C, V − C) that has a minimum
Aij
vi ∈C,vj ∉C
density argmin . This problem can be solved by
C �C��V − C�
different graph-based approaches for community detection.
Mulamba et al. (2016) proposed SybilRadar, a Sybil
attacks detection framework based on structural proper-
ties of online social networks and community structures.
SybilRadar consists of three steps: In the first step, simi-
larity values between a given pair of nodes are computed
Social Network Analysis and Mining (2024) 14:93
using Adamic-Adar metric (Adamic and Adar 2003) which
is based on common neighbors between any given pair of
nodes. Indeed, generally, true nodes tend to share more
friends with other true nodes than with Sybil nodes. In the
second step, the Louvain method (Blondel et al. 2008) is
applied to detect social graph communities. Then, the result-
ing community structure is fed to Within-Inter-Community
(WIC) metric in order to refine the similarities obtained from
the first step. This is ended by tuning of the nodes similarity
values which are greater than 1. Next, the resulting similar-
ity values are assigned to the social graph edges as their
weights. Finally, in the third step, a Modified Short Random
Walk is applied on the weighted social graph, the steady state
probabilities of the random walk represent the posterior trust
information to use in order to perform ranking of nodes.
For further investigation on community detection applied
to Sybil defense, Table 11 gives a classification of pertinent
research works published since 2010 according to the used
models and frameworks of communities.
From Table 11, we can see that the majority of research
works using community detection for Sybil defense fall
under Stochastic framework of Graph model. Whereas
other fewer works use either Unsupervised and Supervised
frameworks of Machine learning model, or Hierarchical
and Meta-heuristic frameworks of Multi-objective model.
However, publications on Sybil defense based on the other
community detection frameworks (namely Pattern detection
and Spectral clustering of Graph model, Semi-supervised
learning of Machine learning model, and Cooperative and
Non-cooperative games of Game thoery model) remain very
rare.
9.4 Web communities
Let G(V, E) be a directed graph representing a subnetwork
of the Word Wide Web (WWW) network, where V is the
vertex set which represents the set of web pages in the
network, and E ⊂ V 2 is the edge set where ∀vi , vj ∈ V , if
(vi , vj ) ∈ E then the page vi cites (refers to) the page vj .
These citations can be tags, hyperlinks, etc. The notion
of Community can be used in the context of WWW to
enhance Web searching results. Indeed, the structuring of
research query results into clusters (communities) can be a
suitable way to enhance page retrieval accuracy in the web.
Let WP = {WP1 , … , WPm }, WPi ⊆ V, ∀ i ∈ {1, … , k} be
a community structure of G, where a community can be
designed either by the topological structure of the WWW
network or the semantic similarity of pages’ contents.
In the case where topological structure of the network
is considered, the approaches rely on the principle that rel-
evant and related web pages are generally located close to
each other in the hyperlinks graph. Thus, their aim consists
on depiction highly cohesive structures using community

Table 8  Classification of research works relative to the applications of communities in complex information networks
Community applications in complex information networks
Collaborative filtering
Alqadah et al. (2015), Azad-
jalal et al. (2017), Bellogin and
Parapar (2012), Cai et al. (2014),
Cañamares and Castells (2017),
Casino et al. (2015), Chen et al.
(2015), Fletcher and Liu (2015),
Hernando et al. (2016), Hu et al.
(2014), Jia et al. (2015), Kant
and Mahara (2018), Saranya and
Sadasivam (2017), Koohi and
Kiani (2016), Koohi and Kiani
(2017), Lee and Ma (2016), Li
et al. (2013), Li et al. (2017), Patra
et al. (2015), Pham et al. (2011),
Pirasteh et al. (2015), Polatidis
and Georgiadis (2017), Wu et al.
(2013), Xiaojun (2017), Yu and
Huang (2016), Zheng et al. (2011),
Zheng et al. (2015), Jiang et al.
(2022), Paleti et al. (2021), Chen
et al. (2021)
Friend recommendation
Akbari et al. (2013), Bagci and
Karagoz (2016), Chakrabarty et al.
(2019), Cui et al. (2018), Saman-
thula and Jiang (2015), Wang et al.
(2015), Wang et al. (2018), Xu and
Yang (2015), Zhang and Li (2011),
Zhang et al. (2015), Zheng et al.
(2015), Chang et al. (2022)
Sybil defense
Ahmed and Abulaish (2013),
Boshmaf et al. (2013), Boshmaf
et al. (2016), Cai and Jermaine
(2012), Cao et al. (2012), Chang
et al. (2013), Danezis and Mittal
(2009), Huang et al. (2013), Jia
et al. (2017), Liu et al. (2014), Ma
et al. (2014), Misra et al. (2016),
Mohaisen et al. (2011), Mulamba
et al. (2016), Nilizadeh et al.
(2017), Ramalingam et al. (2017),
Shi et al. (2013), Stringhini et al.
(2015), Tan et al. (2013), Wei et al.
(2012), Xiao et al. (2015), Xue
et al. (2013), Yang et al. (2016),
Yu et al. (2008)
Web community
Abualigah et al. (2016), Bandari
et al. (2019), Bharti and Raval
(2019), Cobos et al. (2014), Di
Marco and Navigli (2013), Forsati
et al. (2015), He et al. (2014),
Kanavos et al. (2019), Katarya
and Verma (2017), Sisodia et al.
(2017), Tiwari et al. (2019), Tseng
et al. (2014), Yan et al. (2017)
Social Network Analysis and Mining
Service composition
(2024) 14:93
Cherifi et al. (2013), Chhun et al.
(2015), Khanouche et al. (2019),
Klein et al. (2012), Lei and Philip
(2019), Li et al. (2017), Li and He
(2014), Pan and Chai (2018), Shang
et al. (2013), Wen et al. (2019),
Zhang et al. (2016), Jalal et al.
(2023), Chang et al. (2021), Smahi
et al. (2021), Nacer et al. (2017)
Page 37 of 47
93
 93 Page 38 of 47 Social Network Analysis and Mining (2024) 14:93

order to maximize intra-cluster similarities and minimize

Fig. 4  Distribution of literature relative to applications of community
detection in complex information networks
detection approaches. Consequently, a clustering solution
WP = {WP1 , … , WPk } s.t. WPi ⊂ V , is generally obtained
by optimizing some objective functions, max f1 (WPi , WPi )
and min f2 (WPi , WPi ), WPi = WP − WPi , that quantify the
links densities between communities.
On the other hand, in the case semantic similarities are
revealed, the approaches used are knowledge-oriented
which consist on extracting hidden patterns and fea-
tures and using clustering approaches in order to extract
query relevant information. In this context, let consider
WP = {WP1 , … , WPk } s.t. WPi ⊂ V as a clustering solution
on the set of pages V = {v1 , … , vn } such that, every node
vi , ∀ i ∈ {1, … , n} is considered as n−vector of web page
features ( vi ∈ ℝ). In this case, the aim is to optimize objec-
tive functions that quantify similarities between pages in
inter-cluster similarities.
To enhance the search keyword-based engines capabili-
ties, Tseng et al. (2014) proposed an algorithm based on a
variation of k-mean algorithm called Keen-means in order
to cluster Web resources in advance. On the other hand, Di
Marco and Navigli (2013) presented an approach for Web
search result clustering which handles the issue of language
ambiguity. The objective is to enhance the relevance of the
retrieved list of results of a query by using a clustering algo-
rithm. Thus, the set of search results are preprocessed. Then,
using Word Sense Induction (WSI) which automatically dis-
covers the meanings of any given query, the semantics are
injected into the query results. Thence, each query sense is
represented as a cluster of words that co-occur in raw text
with the query. Finally, each search result returned by a Web
search is mapped to the most pertinent cluster and the result-
ing clustering of results is returned.
For further reading on the subject of Web communities,
Table 12 classifies additional relevant references published
in this scope since 2010. The classification is established
according to the models and frameworks constituting our
taxonomy described in Fig. 1 of Sect. 4. Note that the table
does not contain frameworks and models with no published
work.
It can be seen from Table 12 that the majority of publi-
cations about Web communities use Unsupervised machine
learning framework. On the other hand, relatively less
research works are based on Multi-objective model (Hierar-
chical and Mata-heuristic frameworks). In addition to that,
it stands up in the table that Graph model is scarcely used in

Table 9  Classification of research works relative to community detection in the context of collaborative filtering according to the models and
frameworks of the used communities
Models Frameworks Research works

Graph model Patterns detection Lee and Ma (2016)

Machine learning model
Multi-objective optimization model
Spectral clustering
Unsupervised learning
Supervised learning
Hierarchical
Metaheuristic
Bellogin and Parapar (2012)
Alqadah et al. (2015), Casino et al. (2015), Hernando et al. (2016),
Kant and Mahara (2018), Koohi and Kiani (2016), Li et al. (2017),
Xiaojun (2017), Jiang et al. (2022)
Cañamares and Castells (2017), Patra et al. (2015)
Hu et al. (2014), Pham et al. (2011), Paleti et al. (2021)
Chen et al. (2021), Chen et al. (2015)

Table 10  Classification Models Frameworks Research works

of research works relative
to community detection Graph model Stochastic Bagci and Karagoz (2016), Cui et al. (2018)
in the context of friend
Machine learning Unsupervised Wang et al. (2015), Wang et al. (2018), Xu and
recommendation according to
Yang (2015), Zheng et al. (2015), Chang et al.
the models and frameworks of
(2022)
the used communities
Multi-objective optimization Metaheuristic Akbari et al. (2013)
Social Network Analysis and Mining (2024) 14:93
Table 11  Classification of research works relative to community detection in the context of Sybil defense according to the models and frame-
works of the used communities
Models Frameworks
Graph model Stochastic
Machine learning Unsupervised
Supervised
Multi-objective optimization Hierarchical
Metaheuristic
Table 12  Classification of Models
research works relative to Web
communities according to the Graph model
models and frameworks of the
Machine learning model
used communities
Multi-objective model
Web communities. While no substantial work in this scope
falls under Game theory model.
9.5 Web service composition communities
Let WSC = {ws1 , … , wsn } be a composition of n web ser-
vices in the cloud. There are mainly two aspects in which
community notion appears in the context of web composi-
tion: Trust and Quality of Service (QoS).
Let TC = {tc1 , … , tcm } be a set of trust circles, where
each of them is regulated by a certification authority. Every
web service swi ∈ WSC, i ∈ {1, … , n} belongs to a non
empty set of Trust circles TC(swi ) ⊂ TC . The composition
of web services WSC should ensure the Trust policy between
its web services which can belong to different Trust circles.
On the other hand, given a set of web services
WS = {ws1 , … , wsN } , the problem of QoS-based web
service composition consists on finding a synthetized
composition profile CP = {cp1 , … , cpm } such that:
cpi ⊂ WS, ∀ i ∈ {1, … , m} is a cluster of service composition
which satisfies some predefined QoS requirements.
Consequently, Service composition problem can be mod-
eled as a problem of detecting communities of Trust and
QoS-based clusters.
In this context, Nacer et al. (2017) proposed a dynamic
fully distributed model of authentication for composite
Web service which is based on trust circle concept. The
proposed model has four main functionalities: it ensures
Page 39 of 47 93
Research works
Danezis and Mittal (2009), Boshmaf et al. (2013), Boshmaf et al.
(2016), Cai and Jermaine (2012), Cao et al. (2012), Chang et al.
(2013), Huang et al. (2013), Jia et al. (2017), Mohaisen et al. (2011),
Mulamba et al. (2016), Wei et al. (2012), Xue et al. (2013), Yu et al.
(2008), Shi et al. (2013)
Nilizadeh et al. (2017), Tan et al. (2013)
Ramalingam et al. (2017), Xiao et al. (2015)
Misra et al. (2016)
Ahmed and Abulaish (2013), Ahmed and Abulaish (2013)
Frameworks Research works
Stochastic Yan et al. (2017)
Unsupervised Bandari et al. (2019), Forsati et al. (2015), He et al. (2014),
Sisodia et al. (2017), Tiwari et al. (2019), Tseng et al.
(2014)
Supervised Bharti and Raval (2019), Katarya and Verma (2017)
Hierarchical Di Marco and Navigli (2013)
Metaheuristic Abualigah et al. (2016), Cobos et al. (2014)
reliable collaborative trust authentication for arbitrary Web
composite serivce, it processes byond domain authentication
boundaries, it handles security policies conflicts, finally, the
model is scalable and dynamic.
More research works on web service composition com-
munities are classified in Table 13 according to the frame-
work and models which describe the taxonomy we proposed
in Fig. 1.
From Table 13, we can see that only few community
detection frameworks have been used in the context of
Service composition application. These consist mainly of
Meta-heuristic Multi-objective optimization and Unsuper-
vised learning framework. Furthermore, fewer works based
on Hierarchical Multi-objective optimization and Stochastic
framework have been published. Moreover, the other frame-
works have been scarcely investigated in this context.
10 Discussion, open issues and future
research directions
After a thorough examination of existing models and tech-
niques for community detection in complex networks used
in literature and a study of the different applications of com-
munities, we discuss in this section the main open issues
and prospective research directions that would be worth and
interesting to be dealt with.
 93 Page 40 of 47
Table 13  Classification of research works relative to community detection in the context of service composition according to the models and
frameworks of the used communities
Models Framework
Graph model Stochastic
Machine learning model Unsupervised learning
Multi-objective optimization model Hierarchical
Metaheuristic
• Community detection is widely used in collaborative fil-
tering and social collaborative filtering. Indeed, as shown
in Fig. 4, more than 30% of relevant research works pub-
lished mainly in the last decade on the context of applica-
tions of network communities are related to collaborative
filtering. However, the used communities are generally
limited to the Ego-centered networks around a given
node (adjacent neighbors, or K-nearest neighbors). As
consequence, it would be worth to lead more investiga-
tions on the applicability of more accurate community
detection algorithms to formally find more optimized
coarse-grained clusters. This would enhance the time
performance of the system without altering the accuracy
dimension, as the information of correlated non-adjacent
nodes of same communities are considered.
• Even though many improvements have been made in the
context of Collaborative Filtering based on community
detection, further studies should be undertaken. More spe-
cifically, in the context of the scalability and massive data
processing by systems generally with limited the storage
and computational resources. Thus, to enhance process-
ing capacity and reduce the computing time, it would be
interesting to develop parallel algorithms for distributed
computing systems.
• There has been a growing community detection methods
for detecting Sybil attacks. Indeed, as shown in Fig. 4,
more than a quarter (> 25% ) of main research works pub-
lished in the context of community networks applications
concerns Sybil attacks detection. However, these methods
are mainly based on graph theory methods which gener-
ally perform poorly when dealing with real-world attacks.
Indeed, in most graph based detection techniques, to detect
Sybil clusters, it is assumed that the whole topology of the
network is known and the detection of Sybil attacks is a
centralized task. Thus, it would be interesting to use online
Sybil detection methods that are based on decentralized
approaches with local incomplete topological information
view.
• Graph community models are widely used in Sybil and
Shelling attacks detection and it has been shown that they
outperform many other content-based approaches. Despite
Social Network Analysis and Mining (2024) 14:93
Research works
Chang et al. (2021)
Lei and Philip (2019), Jalal et al. (2023), Smahi et al.
(2021)
Shang et al. (2013), Wen et al. (2019)
Chhun et al. (2015), Khanouche et al. (2019), Klein et al.
(2012), Pan and Chai (2018)
these promising results in security fields, questions remain
about the applicability of these approaches in other security
attacks detection mechanisms such as Intrusion Detection
Systems (IDS).
• Multi-objective optimization has been widely used in
literature for community detection in complex networks
in theoretical perspectives. However, there is much less
research works which use Multi-objective optimization for
detecting community structures in real network applica-
tions. Thus, using Multi-objective optimization based com-
munity detection algorithms to enhance networks’ applica-
tion performance would be of great interest to the scientific
community.
• Another important open issue is the detection of dynamic
communities in graph data streaming, which is very com-
mon in real online social networks. In this case, large graph
data is received as a continuous edge stream. This issue is
more challenging, because an edge in the graph cannot be
processed more than once during the computation process.
In such cases, summary structures should be designed in
order to facilitate an effective community detection pro-
cess.
11 Conclusion
Community detection serves as a backbone for informa-
tion mining. The present article aims to extensively sur-
vey relevant and recent research works about community
detection with a new angle: classifying relevant research
works relative to community detection according to the
mathematical model used: Graph model, Machine learn-
ing, Multi-objective, and Game theory. In this setting,
this work highlights the importance of the community
detection in real network applications and data mining in
information networks fields such as Recommender sys-
tems, Sybil attack defense, Friend recommendations, Web
clustering and Service composition. The importance and
originality of this study is that it explores both the existing
community detection frameworks and their applicability in
the analysis of real graph databases in order to explore and
Social Network Analysis and Mining (2024) 14:93
elaborate new strategies to optimally solve many network
application issues in real big data ecosystems. Indeed,
even though it has been proven that community detection
can be an effective way to enhance the accuracy and per-
formance of many network applications, questions remain
about their scalability and their effectiveness in depleting
communities in continuously growing dynamic complex
information networks. Finally, this survey can be consid-
ered as a starting point for researchers interested in dealing
with community detection issue from both theoretical and
application point of view in order to design more accu-
rate approaches for community detection to extract useful
structural information to enhance the performance of real
network applications.
Acknowledgements The authors are grateful to the anonymous refer-
ees for their valuable suggestions and comments which have helped to
improve the quality of the paper and its presentation.
Author contributions All authors have seen and approved the manu-
script, and contributed significantly to the work.
Declarations
Competing interests The authors declare no competing interests.
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