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 2020 International Conference on Computer Science and Software Engineering (CSASE), Duhok, Kurdistan Region – Iraq
Improving Louvain Algorithm by Leveraging Cliques
for Community Detection
Elaf Adel Abbas
College of Information Technology
University of Babylon,
Babylon, Iraq
Ministry of Education
elaf1982adil@gmail.com
Abstract—Community detection is one of the most important fields
that help us in understand and analyze the structure of social
networks. It is a tool to identify closely related groups in terms of
social relations or common interests. In fact, community detection
can be applied in social media, web clients, or e-commerce. For
this purpose, the traditional Louvain algorithm is used for
community detection as a suitable algorithm, since it provides fast,
efficient and robust community detection on large static networks.
However, the high computing complexity of this algorithm is a
motivation of this work. Initially, the existing cliques and the other
nodes which have not included in cliques are considered as
separated communities instead of considering each node in the
network is a community as in the traditional method, then the gain
of integrating neighboring communities is calculated. A specific
research methodology is followed to ensure that the work is
rigorous in achieving the aim of the work. In synthetic and real-
world data, the traditional and improved algorithms had to be
applied to record the results, then analyze them. Experimentally,
the results prove the execution time has reduced if it is compared
with the traditional algorithm while preserving the quality of
partitions at the same time somewhat.
Keywords—social network, community detection algorithms,
Louvain algorithm.
I. INTRODUCTION
The complex networks are a set of many connected nodes
that communicate in various ways. It is also described as the
interactions and connections among members in a real
networked system such as social, biological, and technological
networks [1]. In a social network-based graph structure model,
each node represents the entity and the edge represents the
communication or interaction between these entities in the
network. In general, most of these networks are sparse groups
globally and dense locally. On such, the network such social
network is characterized by a community structure, in which the
nodes within the community have a higher density of edges
while nodes among communities have a lower density of edges
[2].
A defining community is an important step for discovering
what makes entities come together and a comprehensive
understanding of the structural and functional characteristics of
a large network [3]. There are several types of algorithms to
detect community: splitting algorithms detect the community
and remove the edges that connect it to the network,
978-1-7281-5249-3/20$31.00 ©2020 IEEE
Authorized licensed use limited to: Carleton University. Downloaded on July 26,2020 at 11:01:58 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
Huda Naji Nawaf
College of Information Technology
University of Babylon,
Babylon, Iraq
halmamory@itnet.uobabylon.edu.iq
agglomerative methods that applied iteratively by merge similar
nodes/communities together, and the maximization value of an
objective function based on optimization algorithms. While the
modularity is a popular quantitative suggested by Girvan and
Newman to measure the quality of the partitions resulting from
these algorithms mentioned above [4]. Essentially, the
modularity measure can be stated as follows:
Given a unweight graph G=(V, E) where V represents a set of
nodes and E is set of edges between nodes. Suppose u ‫ א‬V, the
(u, v) ‫ א‬E, which represents the relation between u and v. The
modularity of a clustering with k communities (C = {‫ܥ‬ଵ , ‫ܥ‬ଶ ,
,……., ‫ܥ‬௞ }, ‫ܥ‬ଵ ≠ Ø and ‫ܥ‬ଵ ‫ ؿ‬V ) is given by [3]:
ௗ೔ ௗೕ
ଵ
ܳሺ‫ܥ‬ሻ ൌ σ௜‫א‬௩ σ௝‫א‬௩ሺ‫ܣ‬௜௝ െ ሻߪሺ‫ܥ‬௜ ǡ ‫ܥ‬௝ ሻ (1)
ଶ௠ ଶ௠
Where Aij the weight of the edge between i and j, ݀௜ is the
summation of the weights of the edges attached to vertex i, ‫ܥ‬௜
the community to which vertex i assigned , m can be calculated
by:
ଵ
݉ ൌ σ௜௝ ‫ܣ‬ij (2)
ଶ
while ߪሺ‫ܥ‬௜ ǡ ‫ܥ‬௝ ሻ is a function return 1 if ‫ܥ‬௜ and ‫ܥ‬௝ in the same
community and 0 otherwise. In fact, finding the better
modularity value is NP-hard problem [5]. However, many
algorithms depend the heuristic strategies to optimize this
metric.
Girvan and Newman (GN) algorithm proposed a
hierarchical division algorithm, principally the
betweenness value for all edges of the graph is calculated. Then,
the edge(s) with the highest betweenness (are) removed. These
steps are repeated until no edges remain, then the level of
communities of higher modularity is determined, with O(m3)
complexity time [4]. Indeed, there are several methods in
literature have been suggested to optimize and speed up the GN
algorithm.
The original GN has been developed in [6] to optimize it.
The main idea of the work is to classify the communities in two
types; the strong communities consist of nodes that make up the
inner degree of each node higher than that of the outer degree
and the weak communities whose total internal degree of nodes
exceeds their total external degree. It taking into account a local
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 2020 International Conference on Computer Science and Software Engineering (CSASE), Duhok, Kurdistan Region – Iraq
measure that represents the edge-clustering coefficient. At each
iteration, the edge with the smallest clustering coefficient is
removed, the measure is recalculated again and so on. Besides,
the stopping criterion of GN algorithm has also been updated
based on the properties of communities rather than modularity.
On another side, fast greedy modularity optimization has been
suggested to improve the time complexity to be O(n log n) [7].
The latter has been optimized using. GN algorithm by starting
with isolated nodes and iteratively merging pairs of nodes to
increase the modularity of each step.
Louvain algorithm is a method to extract communities from
large networks created by Blondel and others from
the University of Louvain with time complexity O(m) [8]. It has
gained wide use for the optimization of modularity to be the
most effective algorithm in terms of quality and speed. As a
matter of fact, it uses hierarchical division and improved greed
in two primary stages: (i) the local movement of the vertices
and; (ii) grouping several vertices of the original graph into
super vertices to reduce the size of a network at each level.
In literature, some algorithms have been presented to
improve the Louvain method. The Louvain+ [9] algorithm is a
comprehensive multi-level method that attempts to improve the
quality of modularity by including a coarsening phase to extend
the Louvain algorithm. However, this algorithm is not superior
over the traditional Louvain algorithm in terms of complexity of
time, rather it increases the complexity.
Speeding up the Louvain algorithm proposed by [10] to
detect the communities in the large graph in a short time by
moving the node to the random neighbor, but not the best
neighbor. However, the random selection neighborhood makes
greed less of Louvain's algorithm and more exploratory.
The authors in [11] proposed a hybrid algorithm based on the
Louvain algorithm and Label Propagation Algorithm (LPA).
This algorithm divided the network into two sub-graph: the first
one includes the key nodes with a high degree which
predetermined, and the second is the edge nodes which include
the other nodes. Afterward, the Louvain algorithm and LPA
have been used to detect the communities of the first and second
sub-graphs, respectively. That is, the authors intend to improve
the running time in the large network using both algorithms.
The work that has been presented in [12] is to overcome the
problem of poorly connected inside communities; thus
addressing the weakness at the Louvain algorithm when it's
implementing iteratively from their view. Consequently, the
authors proposed a new algorithm called the Leiden algorithm.
In this algorithm, they validate the real relations inside the
community before resuming their procedure. Practically, their
experimental results have shown that the running time and the
community structure have been improved.
Although there are a lot of studies proposed improving the
Louvain algorithm on different sides; as mention above, the
proposed work based on the clique principle to improve the
effectiveness of the algorithm.
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The paper is organized as follows: In Section II, the Louvain
algorithm is displayed for community detection. Section III
presents the development and details description of the proposed
algorithm. The experimental and evaluation results are
displayed and discussed in section IV. Finally, the conclusion
and future work are highlighted in Section V.
II. LOUVAIN ALGORITHM
Louvain algorithm is one of the most effective algorithms
that developed to divide the community based on modularity
optimization. Initially, the Louvain algorithm considers each
vertex as a community see Figs. 1a and 1b. Mainly, the
algorithm involves two steps:
The local movement of the vertices. By choosing one vertex
randomly, the modularity οܳ gain can be examined for moving
this vertex to all neighbor communities. Consequently, the
vertex would be placed into the neighbor community which
achieves largest value modularity gain, if the modularity gain is
none positive, the vertex stays in its original community. This
step will be repeating until all vertices examined and no longer
more modularity gains for any vertex, thus small communities
are formed. The parameter οܳ refers to the modularity gain and
it is defined as follows [8]:
οܳ ൌ ݁௜ǡ஼ି ಼೔మ೘
σ೟೚೟
(3)
Where ‡୧ǡେ is the summation of the weights of the edges between
vertex i and community C; Ki the summation of the weight of
edges for vertex i, and σ௧௢௧ the summation of the weight of
edges incident to vertices in the community. Fig. 1c states the
local movement step.
Grouping several vertices into supervertices. The vertices
belonging to the same community are aggregated into a single
vertex named supervertices as illustrated in Fig 1d.
Reconstructing meta-graph by computing the weight of
edges among all supervertices. When there are vertices in
different partitions in the graph, and there is at least one edge
between them; the supervertices must connect with each other.
At the lower level of the graph, the weight is calculating which
represents the sum of all edges connected between the vertices
in the different partitions. While the self-loop included in
supervertices with its weight describes the sum of the edges
connecting the linked vertices in the same partition of the graph
at the lower level.
These two steps of the Louvain algorithm are repeated until
the modularity value is no longer improved and hierarchical
communities are generated as shown in Figs. 1e and 1f. The
example is illustrated in the figure explains the algorithm of
Louvain [3] for only two iterations.
 2020 International Conference on Computer Science and Software Engineering (CSASE), Duhok, Kurdistan Region – Iraq

Fig. 1. Louvain Algorithm Steps Fig. 2. Proposed Algorithm Steps

III. PREPARE PROPOSED ALGORITHM (IMPROVED Finally, the original process of the traditional algorithm is
LOUVAIN ALGORITHM) resumed; where each resultant community is represented as one
node with self-loop. The self-loop refers to the internal
Essentially, the traditional Louvain's algorithm forms the
connection of nodes in the same community and edges refer to
initial communities by making each individual node in network
the external connection of nodes with other nodes from different
a community, then the modularity gain is the criterion for
communities as illustrated in Fig 2d. In practice, the algorithm
moving each community to each other. Intuitively, the
meets the stopping criteria after one iterative which lead to a
operation suffers time complexity problem, which is the
reduction in execution time if compare it with the traditional
motivation of this work to alleviate the problem. A clique-
algorithm. To translate these steps to the Pseudocode,
Louvain algorithm is a proposed algorithm to improve the
ALGORITHM I introduced our proposed algorithm.
Louvain algorithm in terms of the time complexity. Essentially,
the traditional algorithm is linear with the number of edges Algorithm I: clique-Louvain Algorithms
whereas the improved is linear with the number of cliques . 1: Function clique_ Louvain Algorithm (Graph G)
Generally, the key point of our proposed algorithm is 2: Index_Clique ← findclique(G)
looking for the cliques that inherently found in network to form 3: currentGraph ← Aggregation(G, Index_ Clique)
the communities, given the undirected graph G= (V, E), where 4: Index_Com: The index of a clique or node as community ‫א‬
V denotes a set of vertices and E denotes a set of edges between original graph (G), each clique included at least 3 or more nodes.
vertices. The graph Gs= (Vs, Es) is a sub-graph of G if and only 5: Initialize each clique with its own community and the vertices that
if Vs‫ك‬ǡƒ† Es‫ ”‘ˆك‬every edge between (Vi, Vj)ęEs and not in clique it is own community
vertices Vi, Vj‫א‬Vs. 6: Modularity ← -∞
Figure 2a illustrates simple network of a coherent structure 7: while Modularity < Q(currentGraph, indexCom)
with different sizes as an example. A clique-Louvain algorithm 8: Modularity ← Q(currentGraph, indexCom)
is proposing to find the cliques that involves three members at 9: Index_Com ← MoveNodes(currentGraph)
least as the first step of the algorithm see Fig. 2 (b). Principally,
10: currentGraph ← Aggregation(currentGraph, Index_Com)
each clique or a node (is not member in a clique) in the graph
11: Index_Com← put each vertex of currentGraph in its own
are a community. It is more likely the members of a single
community
clique belong into one community practically. Under these
conditions, the algorithm provides some computations time to 12: End while
compute the modularity gain between communities in the first 13: return currentGraph
iteration. Computing the modularity gain is the second step of 14: End Function
algorithm, next moving the vertices or cliques. 15: Function findclique(Graph G)
Given the initial communities (clique or node), one community 16: Index_Clique: the index of community for each clique of G
can be chosen randomly and compute the modularity gain of 17: Index_Clique ← find clique in Graph that is large than 3 nodes
merging it with a neighbor (clique or node). Next, moving the 18: return Index_Clique
community chosen into the neighbor that achieves a maximum 19: End Function
value of modularity gain as explained in Fig. 2c. 20: Function MoveNodes(Graph G)

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 2020 International Conference on Computer Science and Software Engineering (CSASE), Duhok, Kurdistan Region – Iraq

21: Index_Com : the index of community for each vertex of G TABLE I. REAL DATASET INFORMATION
22: while one or more nodes are moved do Dataset Dolphin Facebook Digg
23: for random v ‫ א‬V( G ) do Vertex 62 21099 193808
24: bestGain ← -∞ Edges 159 55883 886335
25: bestCommunity ← community_of_v Average degree 5.1290 5.2972 9.1465
26: for ‫ ׊‬neighboring nodes n of v do
27: Calculate gainModularity ← ∆Q between nodes v and n
B. Real Networks
28: if bestGain < gainModularity then
29: bestGain ← gainModularity
In order to validate the proposed algorithm, a more realistic
network environment has been utilized such as; Dolphin Social
30: bestCommunity ← community_of_n
Network [14], DIGG and Facebook [15]). The Dolphin Social
31: End if Network is a social network of bottlenose dolphins, where the
32: End for nodes are the bottlenose dolphins and an edge indicates a
33: currentGraph ← place v in the bestGain frequent association. The dolphins were observed between
34: End for 1994 and 2001. While DIGG is the friendship network among
35: End while bloggers; each node in the network is a user and each directed
edge denotes that a user replied to another user. The dataset was
36: return Index_Com
observed from 2005 to 2009. Finally, a Facebook dataset is an
37: End Function undirected network contains friendship data among users. In
38: Function Aggregation(Graph G, partition Index_Com) nature, the node is a user and the edge is a friendship between
39: currentGraph ← aggregation nodes which are in same two users. The information was recorded for the period from
community based on Index_Com at graph (G). 2007 to 2008. TABLE I demonstrates the related information
40: return currentGraph of the three datasets.
41: End Function C. Time Computation Measurement
Louvain and the clique-Louvain algorithms have been
IV. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS
implemented on the synthetic and real networks for comparison
The experiential outcomes are profoundly dependent on the purposes in terms of execution time and modularity.
choice of experiential tools and a setting of the evaluation
parameters. The modularity is used to measure the quality of Figure (3) shows the performance of the algorithms over six
divided communities, and computation time is utilized to datasets versus time, where the vertical axis is the execution
validate the performance of improving Louvain. time, and the horizontal axis is the dataset kind. As illustrated,
the performance of the clique-Louvain algorithm a bit better
In this work, two types of datasets have been chosen: than that of the traditional algorithm when applied in the
synthetic such as LRF1, LRF2, LRF3, and real networks such synthetic networks. Whereas the algorithm records a very good
as DIGG, and Facebook. Important to say, the algorithm works performance when applied in the real networks. Generally, the
on any dataset provided that relations existing among nodes. execution time increases as the size of the dataset increases.
For evaluation purpose, the performance of the proposed However, the matter may differs in case of synthetic networks
algorithm has to be compared with the original Louvain which need more running time than that of real networks
algorithm. Both algorithms have been programmed in the despite the small size of its data. The difference of execution
Python language and executed on a PC equipped with Intel time between the original and improved algorithm is more clear
Core I7-2630 of 2.00GHz and 4.00GB RAM. as the size of the network increases
A. Synthetic Networks D. Modularity Measurement
LFR is a Synthetic benchmark network [13], which has many A modularity measure is described as an objective function to
adjustable parameters that allow fast graphic prototypes of evaluate the quality of communities, so modularity is the
varying degrees of community structure. In this work, three important standard to measure quality of the Louvain algorithm
scenarios with different configurations were applied. In the first that is explained in “(1)” . According to the results obtained in
scenario, the LFR1 network consists of 250 nodes; average Fig. 4, which illustrated the modularity measure of Louvain and
node degree 5; node power-law distribution 3; community- clique-Louvain algorithms under various datasets. It can be said
scale power-law index 1.5; and community structure definition the results are relatively close to each ' other and can overlook
is equal to 0.1. In the second scenario, the LFR2 and LFR3 the little difference versus improving the complexity of time
networks consists of 1000, 10000 nodes with same parameters: provided by the proposed algorithm.
average node degree 8; the node power-law distribution 2;
community-scale power-law index 2; and community structure
definition is equal to 0.56.

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 2020 International Conference on Computer Science and Software Engineering (CSASE), Duhok, Kurdistan Region – Iraq
Fig. 3. Execution Time of clique-Louvain and Louvain Algorithms
Fig. 4. Modularity Measure of clique-Louvain and Louvain
More precisely, the modularity of clique-Louvain algorithm
is identical, if not better than that of the traditional algorithm
when applied in LRF1, LRF2, LRF3, and DIGG. As for the
Facebook and Dolphin datasets, the modularity a bit less than
that of the traditional algorithm, which may the reason is the
structure of the dataset. Indeed, the structure of Facebook
dataset characterized by largely of overlapping cliques which
may affect the modularity.
In nature, modularity and complexity time are very
important measures to assess the performance of an algorithm,
however, setting a trade-off between complexity and quality
may depend on the applications. In fact, the two parameters are
may relate to one another somewhat inversely since the
traditional Louvain is a greedy algorithm to approximate the
optimal modularity of the graph.
V. CONCLUSION
One of the most important tasks in analyzing complex
networks is community detection. Detecting communities in
social networks are far from easy: algorithms have to be fast, at
the same time have to provide high-quality. The proposed
clique-Louvain algorithm highlights some findings. In this
work, we improve the Louvain algorithm in terms of the time
complexity. A clique-Louvain algorithm was proposed to find
the cliques that involves three members at least as the first step
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of the algorithm. Principally, each clique or a node (not member
in a clique) in the graph are a community. It is more likely the
members of a single clique belong into one community
practically. Therefore, it can conclude that cliques which
consider as a core of communities improves the performance of
the algorithm, at the same time keeps relatively the quality.
Generally speaking, the modularity of the proposed
algorithm is almost identical to that of a traditional algorithm
when applied to synthetic networks. In the same scenario of
modularity, the matter is a bit somewhat different when applied
both algorithms on real networks. In sum, the reason can be
attributed to the structures of the networks. The overall results
of the clique-Louvain algorithm shown that this algorithm
achieves a decrease the execution time over original Louvain
algorithm from (18.47%) at Facebook dataset and (14.94) at
DIGG dataset. Employing our proposed algorithm for the
dynamic networks will be an aim as possible future work.
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