Benchmarking Evolutionary Community Detection Algorithms in Dynamic Networks

In dynamic complex networks, entities interact and form network communities that evolve over time. Among the many static Community Detection (CD) solutions, the modularity-based Louvain, or Greedy Modularity Algorithm (GMA), is widely employed in real-world applications due to its intuitiveness and scalability. Nevertheless, addressing CD in dynamic graphs remains an open problem, since the evolution of the network connections may poison the identification of communities, which may be evolving at a slower pace. Hence, naively applying GMA to successive network snapshots may lead to temporal inconsistencies in the communities. Two evolutionary adaptations of GMA, sGMA and $α$GMA, have been proposed to tackle this problem. Yet, evaluating the performance of these methods and understanding to which scenarios each one is better suited is challenging because of the lack of a comprehensive set of metrics and a consistent ground truth. To address these challenges, we propose (i) a benchmarking framework for evolutionary CD algorithms in dynamic networks and (ii) a generalised modularity-based approach (NeGMA). Our framework allows us to generate synthetic community-structured graphs and design evolving scenarios with nine basic graph transformations occurring at different rates. We evaluate performance through three metrics we define, i.e. Correctness, Delay, and Stability. Our findings reveal that $α$GMA is well-suited for detecting intermittent transformations, but struggles with abrupt changes; sGMA achieves superior stability, but fails to detect emerging communities; and NeGMA appears a well-balanced solution, excelling in responsiveness and instantaneous transformations detection.