Finding Better Web Communities in Digraphs via Max-Flow Min-Cut

Chung Chan, Ali Al-Bashabsheh, Da Sun Handason Tam, Chao Zhao

Abstract: We consider the web community detection problem by providing a cost function that, not only penalizes external connections, but also rewards the internal ones. Our formulation addresses limitations of cut-clustering and extends web communities to digraphs. The formulation is parametric, resulting in a hierarchy of communities that is representable in linear storage and computable in a linear number of maxflow computations. Experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets show that the proposed method can find better web communities and more densest subgraphs than previous formulations. Simple examples also show that it can return different and more meaningful communities compared to other formulations that are based on graph conductance, map equation and modularity score.