Clique guided community detection

Discovering communities to understand and model network structures has been a fundamental problem in several fields including social networks, physics, and biology. Many algorithms have been developed for finding the communities. Modularity based technique is fairly new relative to clustering, though it is very popular currently. Although some fast modularity based algorithms exist for detecting communities, the quality of these solutions is limited. At the other extreme, a clique embodies a basic community as it has the greatest possible edge density. However, the requirement that each pair of vertices be connected is too strict. Therefore, techniques to merge partitioned cliques using a hill-climbing greedy algorithm have been studied to form communities. However, the task of finding cliques is computationally expensive. In this paper, we present a new approach for fast and efficient community detection. We propose a clique guided community detection framework that consists of two phases. In the first phase, the framework finds disjoint cliques. In the second phase, the cliques from the first phase are used to guide the merging of individual vertices until a good quality solution is obtained. For the first phase, we develop an algorithm named MaCH (Maximum Clique Heuristic), which is a new approach to compute disjoint cliques using a heuristic-based branch-and-bound technique. We provide experimental results to demonstrate the efficiency of the new algorithm and compare our approach with other previously proposed algorithms.