Overlapping communities detection through weighted graph community games

by Stefano Benati, Justo Puerto, Antonio M. Rodríguez-Chía, Francisco Temprano

We propose a new model to detect the overlapping communities of a network that is based on cooperative games and mathematical programming. More specifically, communities are defined as stable coalitions of a weighted graph community game and they are revealed as the optimal solution of a mixed-integer linear programming problem. Exact optimal solutions are obtained for small and medium sized instances and it is shown that they provide useful information about the network structure, improving on previous contributions. Next, a heuristic algorithm is developed to solve the largest instances and used to compare two variations of the objective function.