Line graphs, link partitions, and overlapping communities

Abstract

In this paper, we use a partition of the links of a network in order to uncover its community structure. This approach allows for communities to overlap at nodes so that nodes may be in more than one community. We do this by making a node partition of the line graph of the original network. In this way we show that any algorithm that produces a partition of nodes can be used to produce a partition of links. We discuss the role of the degree heterogeneity and propose a weighted version of the line graph in order to account for this.