Walk-modularity and community structure in networks

Modularity maximization has been one of the most widely used approaches in the last decade for discovering community structure in networks of practical interest in biology, computing, social science, statistical mechanics, and more. Modularity is a quality function that measures the difference between the number of edges found within clusters minus the number of edges one would statistically expect to find based on some equivalent random graph model. We explore a natural generalization of modularity based on the difference between the actual and expected number of walks within clusters, which we refer to as walk-modularity. Walk-modularity can be expressed in matrix form, and community detection can be performed by finding the leading eigenvector of the walk-modularity matrix. We demonstrate community detection on both synthetic and real-world networks and find that walk-modularity maximization returns significantly improved results compared to traditional modularity maximization.