Modularity based community detection in heterogeneous networks

Heterogeneous networks are networks consisting of different types of nodes and multiple types of edges linking such nodes. While community detection has been extensively developed as a useful technique for analyzing networks that contain only one type of nodes, very few community detection techniques have been developed for heterogeneous networks. In this paper, we propose a modularity based community detection framework for heterogeneous networks. Unlike existing methods, the proposed approach has the flexibility to treat the number of communities as an unknown quantity. We describe a Louvain type maximization method for finding the community structure that maximizes the modularity function. Our simulation results show the advantages of the proposed method over existing methods. Moreover, the proposed modularity function is shown to be consistent under a heterogeneous stochastic blockmodel framework. Analyses of the DBLP four-area dataset and a MovieLens dataset demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed method.