Hierarchical community detection via rank-2 symmetric nonnegative matrix factorization

Background Community discovery is an important task for revealing structures in large networks. The massive size of contemporary social networks poses a tremendous challenge to the scalability of traditional graph clustering algorithms and the evaluation of discovered communities. Methods We propose a divide-and-conquer strategy to discover hierarchical community structure, nonoverlapping within each level. Our algorithm is based on the highly efficient rank-2 symmetric nonnegative matrix factorization. We solve several implementation challenges to boost its efficiency on modern computer architectures, specifically for very sparse adjacency matrices that represent a wide range of social networks. Conclusions Empirical results have shown that our algorithm has competitive overall efficiency and leading performance in minimizing the average normalized cut, and that the nonoverlapping communities found by our algorithm recover the ground-truth communities better than state-of-the-art algorithms for overlapping community detection. In addition, we present a new dataset of the DBLP computer science bibliography network with richer meta-data and verifiable ground-truth knowledge, which can foster future research in community finding and interpretation of communities in large networks.