Modularity maximization using completely positive programming

Community detection is one of the most prominent problems of social network analysis. In this paper, a novel method for Modularity Maximization (MM) for community detection is presented which exploits the Alternating Direction Augmented Lagrangian (ADAL) method for maximizing a generalized form of Newman's modularity function. We first transform Newman's modularity function into a quadratic program and then use Completely Positive Programming (CPP) to map the quadratic program to a linear program, which provides the globally optimal maximum modularity partition. In order to solve the proposed CPP problem, a closed form solution using the ADAL merged with a rank minimization approach is proposed. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated on several real-world data sets used for benchmarks community detection. Simulation results shows the proposed technique provides outstanding results in terms of modularity value for crisp partitions.