***** To join INSNA, visit http://www.insna.org ***** Allowing communities to overlap is certainly desirable, though the methods that do that have other problems that make up for those advantages. (There definitely need to be better methods that allow overlap effectively...) Some of the hard partitioning methods allow the consideration of things like overlap without doing overlap---e.g., a node could be assigned an assignment strength to multiple communities even if an algorithm only ultimately assigns it to one community. Again, I think it would be good to look at some survey and review articles to see the pros and cons of various methods. In terms of the Blondel method (often called Louvain method, btw) for optimizing modularity, you actually get better modularity values if you subsequently apply Kernighan-Lin steps. (In fact, that's a good thing to do generally after one applies the various optimization techniques.) Again, though, I think tying oneself to one method rather than more thoroughly seeing the results of different methods---one can get nearly equal modularity values from rather different partitions (see Good et al)---so it's rather important to be cautious with this. ----- Mason ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Mason A. Porter University Lecturer (and Tutorial Fellow, Somerville College) Oxford Centre for Industrial and Applied Mathematics Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford Homepage: http://www.maths.ox.ac.uk/~porterm, IM: tepid451 Blog: http://masonporter.blogspot.com/ ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- "I don't know. Maybe the knowledge of asymptotic analysis will lead to less starvation among African children?" --- Me, in an early draft of a grant proposal when asked to address how the project will help with the socio-economic development of third-world countries ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- _____________________________________________________________________ SOCNET is a service of INSNA, the professional association for social network researchers (http://www.insna.org). To unsubscribe, send an email message to [log in to unmask] containing the line UNSUBSCRIBE SOCNET in the body of the message.