An inferential procedure for community structure validation in networks

Community structure’ is a commonly observed feature of real networks. The term refers to the presence in a network of groups of nodes (communities) that feature high internal connectivity and are poorly connected to each other. Whereas the issue of community detection has been addressed in several works, the problem of validating a partition of nodes as a good community structure for a network has received little attention and remains an open issue. We propose an inferential procedure for community structure validation of network partitions, which relies on concepts from network enrichment analysis. The proposed procedure allows to compare the adequacy of different partitions of nodes as community structures. Moreover, it can be employed to assess whether two networks share the same community structure, and to compare the performance of different network clustering algorithms.