Simulate to Detect: A Multi-agent System for Community Detection

Abstract

Community detection in social networks is a well-known problem encountered in many fields. Many traditional algorithms have been proposed to solve it, with recurrent problems: impossibility to deal with dynamic networks, sensitivity to noise, no detection of overlapping communities, exponential running time. This paper proposes a multi-agent system that replays the evolution of a network and, in the same time, reproduces the rise and fall of communities. After presenting the strengths and weaknesses of existing community detection algorithms, we describe the multi-agent system we propose. Then, we compare our solution with existing works, and show some advantages of our method, in particular the possibility to dynamically detect the communities.