Title: Fluid Communities: A Competitive, Scalable and Diverse Community Detection Algorithm,
Abstract: We introduce a community detection algorithm (Fluid Communities) based on the
idea of fluids interacting in an environment, expanding and contracting as a
result of that interaction. Fluid Communities is based on the propagation
methodology, which represents the state-of-the-art in terms of computational
cost and scalability. While being highly efficient, Fluid Communities is able
to find communities in synthetic graphs with an accuracy close to the current
best alternatives. Additionally, Fluid Communities is the first
propagation-based algorithm capable of identifying a variable number of
communities in network. To illustrate the relevance of the algorithm, we
evaluate the diversity of the communities found by Fluid Communities, and find
them to be significantly different from the ones found by alternative methods.