A Divide-and-Link algorithm for hierarchical clustering in networks

This paper introduces a hierarchical clustering algorithm in networks based upon a first divisive stage to break the graph and a second linking stage which is used to join nodes. As a particular case, this algorithm is applied to the specific problem of community detection in social networks, where a betweenness measure is considered for the divisive criterion and a similarity measure associated to data is used for the linking criterion. We show that this algorithm is very flexible as well as quite competitive (from both a performance and a computational complexity point of view) in relation with a set of state-of-the-art algorithms. Furthermore, the output given by the proposed algorithm allows to show in a dynamic and interpretable way the evolution of how the groups are split in the network.