The Louvain method is a simple, efficient and easy-to-implement method for

identifying communities in large networks. The method unveils hierarchies of

communities and allows to zoom within communities to discover sub-communities,
sub-sub-communities, etc. It is today one of the most widely used method for
detecting communities in large networks.

The method is a greedy optimization method that attempts to optimize the

"modularity" of a partition of the network. The optimization is performed in two
steps. First, the method looks for "small" communities by optimizing modularity
locally. Second, it aggregates nodes belonging to the same community and builds a
new network whose nodes are the communities. These steps are repeated iteratively
until a maximum of modularity is attained and a hierarchy of communities is
produced. Although the exact computational complexity of the method is not
known, the method seems to run in time O (n log n) with most of the computational
effort spent on the optimization at the first level. Exact modularity optimization is
known to be NP-hard.

Proposed method:The Louvain algorithm has first been introduced to find partitions of high NewmanGirvan modularity, which is the most widely used criterion to evaluate a partition of
a complex network. The algorithm uses a local greedy optimization to find a local
maxima of modularity. It consists in moving nodes one by one in one of their
neighboring community so as to obtain the maximal increase of modularity.
We proposed a novel method of hierarchical refinement of the Louvain method. The
dataset is divided into two parts 70% and 30%. The first half of the dataset is used
for meta-graph construction i.e. replacing the communities as a single individual
nodes. Thus the Louvain algorithm is therefore an iteration of two sub-procedures:
local optimization and meta-graph construction.
The rest 30% data is mixed with the meta-graph and the Louvain algorithm is
applied again to finally form the final community structure. The results have been
shown as the table below.
TABLE

Note:The Louvain algorithm contains several sub-functions that must be precisely defined
and are strongly related to the Newman-Girvan modularity function to be optimized.
Basically, one must define functions to remove (resp. insert) a node from (resp. in) a
community and update all the information needed by the algorithm, and a function
to compute the gain (or loss) in the value of modularity when a node is moved in a
given community.