A hierarchical overlapping community detection method based on closed trail distance and maximal cliques

An important feature of real networks is their hierarchy and the existence of overlapping communities. Hierarchical agglomerative clustering is one way to determine the hierarchy of a network. To ensure the existence of overlapping communities, it is appropriate to choose the base elements for clustering - edges, cliques, etc. These base elements can then have common vertices and naturally provide the possibility of overlap. The proposed community detection method uses hierarchical agglomerative clustering on the 2-edge-connected component of the graph. Communities are constructed from maximal cliques as base elements. Novel dissimilarities for hierarchical agglomerative clustering were introduced for the merging of cliques. The dissimilarities use the size of the overlapped cliques and closed trail distance to express dissimilarity between communities in networks. The single linkage approach contains and extends the results of k-CPM. The proposed algorithm utilizing deterministic dissimilarity achieves comparable or superior outcomes compared to standard algorithms used for hierarchical or overlapping community detection.