Community Detection — Graph Clustering in Networks

Community detection is a family of graph-partitioning algorithms that discover densely connected sub-groups — communities — within a network. First formalised through the modularity measure by Girvan and Newman (2002), the field advanced rapidly with the Louvain method (Blondel et al., 2008), the Leiden refinement (Traag et al., 2019), and the information-theoretic Infomap approach. All variants answer the same question: which nodes cluster together more tightly among themselves than with the rest of the network?