Community detection is an important tool for analyzing the social graph of mobile phone users. The problem of nding communities in static graphs has been widely studied. However, since mobile social networks evolve over time, static graph algorithms are not sucient. To be useful in practice (e.g. when used by a telecom analyst), the stability of the partitions becomes critical. We tackle this particular use case in this paper: tracking evolution of com- munities in dynamic scenarios with focus on stability. We propose two modications to a widely used static community detection algorithm: we introduce xed nodes and preferential attachment to pre-existing com- munities. We then describe experiments to study the stability and quality of the resulting partitions on real-world social networks, represented by monthly call graphs for millions of subscribers.
Complex networks can often be divided in dense sub-networks called communities. Using a partition edit distance, we study how three community detection algorithms transform their outputs if the input network is slightly modified. The instabilities appear to be important and we propose a modification of one algorithm to stabilize it and to allow the tracking of the communities in an evolving network. This modification has one parameter which is a tradeoff between stability and quality. The resulting algorithm appears to be very effective. We finally use it on an evolving network of blogs.