A framework for community detection in heterogeneous multi-relational networks

Abstract: There has been a surge of interest in community detection in homogeneous single-relational networks which contain only one type of nodes and edges. However, many real-world systems are naturally described as heterogeneous multi-relational networks which contain multiple types of nodes and edges. In this paper, we propose a new method for detecting communities in such networks. Our method is based on optimizing the composite modularity, which is a new modularity proposed for evaluating partitions of a heterogeneous multi-relational network into communities. Our method is parameter-free, scalable, and suitable for various networks with general structure. We demonstrate that it outperforms the state-of-the-art techniques in detecting pre-planted communities in synthetic networks. Applied to a real-world Digg network, it successfully detects meaningful communities.