Constructing Real-Life Benchmarks for Community Detection by Rewiring Edges

In order to make the performance evaluation of community detection algorithms more accurate and deepen our analysis of community structures and functional characteristics of real-life networks, a new benchmark constructing method is designed from the perspective of directly rewiring edges in a real-life network instead of building a model. Based on the method, two kinds of novel benchmarks with special functions are proposed. The first kind can accurately approximate the microscale and mesoscale structural characteristics of the original network, providing ideal proxies for real-life networks and helping to realize performance analysis of community detection algorithms when a real network varies characteristics at multiple scales. The second kind is able to independently vary the community intensity in each generated benchmark and make the robustness evaluation of community detection algorithms more accurate. Experimental results prove the effectiveness and superiority of our proposed method. It enables more real-life networks to be used to construct benchmarks and helps to deepen our analysis of community structures and functional characteristics of real-life networks.