Distributed community detection in web-scale networks

Partitioning large networks into smaller sub-networks (communities) is an important tool to analyze the structure of complex linked systems. In recent years, many in-memory community detection algorithms have been proposed for graphs with millions of edges. Analyzing massive graphs with billions of edges is impossible for existing algorithms. In this contribution, we show how to find community partitions of networks with billions of edges. Our approach is based on an ensemble learning scheme for community detection that provides a way to identify high quality partitions from an ensemble of partitions with lower quality. We present a pre-processing procedure for community detection algorithms that significantly decreases the problem size. After reducing the problem size, traditional non-distributed community detection algorithms can be applied. We implemented a weak but highly scalable label propagation algorithm on top of the distributed-computing framework Apache Hadoop. The evaluation of our implementation on a 50-node Hadoop cluster and with evaluation datasets up to 3.3 billion edges shows very good results with respect to clustering quality as well as scalability. For a smaller 260 million edge network, we show that our preprocessing can improve the results of the popular Louvain modularity clustering algorithm.