ROBustness In Network (robin): An R Package for Comparison and Validation of Communities

Authors

Valeria Policastro, Universitá degli Studi della Campania
Dario Righelli, Universitá di Padova
Annamaria Carissimo, Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche
Luisa Cutillo, University of Leeds
Italia De Feis, Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche

Date of this Version

6-2021

Document Type

Article

Citation

The R Journal (June 2021) 13(1); Editor: Dianne Cook

Comments

Copyright 2021, The R Foundation. Open access material. License: CC BY 4.0 International

Abstract

In network analysis, many community detection algorithms have been developed. However, their implementation leaves unaddressed the question of the statistical validation of the results. Here, we present robin (ROBustness In Network), an R package to assess the robustness of the community structure of a network found by one or more methods to give indications about their reliability. The procedure initially detects if the community structure found by a set of algorithms is statistically significant and then compares two selected detection algorithms on the same graph to choose the one that better fits the network of interest. We demonstrate the use of our package on the American College Football benchmark dataset.