Finding communities in directed networks

To identify communities in directed networks, a generalized form of modularity is proposed by presenting the quantity LinkRank, which can be considered as the PageRank of links, which is consistent with the original modularity in undirected networks.

Abstract

To identify communities in directed networks, we propose a generalized form of modularity in directed networks by presenting the quantity LinkRank, which can be considered as the PageRank of links. This generalization is consistent with the original modularity in undirected networks and the modularity optimization methods developed for undirected networks can be directly applied to directed networks by optimizing our modified modularity. Also, a model network, which can be used as a benchmark network in further community studies, is proposed to verify our method. Our method is supposed to find communities effectively in citation- or reference-based directed networks.