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Main Authors: Wang, Yufeng, Bai, Yiguang, Zhu, Tianqing, Ayed, Ismail Ben, Yuan, Jing
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.22684
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author Wang, Yufeng
Bai, Yiguang
Zhu, Tianqing
Ayed, Ismail Ben
Yuan, Jing
author_facet Wang, Yufeng
Bai, Yiguang
Zhu, Tianqing
Ayed, Ismail Ben
Yuan, Jing
contents Community partitioning is crucial in network analysis, with modularity optimization being the prevailing technique. However, traditional modularity-based methods often overlook fairness, a critical aspect in real-world applications. To address this, we introduce protected group networks and propose a novel fairness-modularity metric. This metric extends traditional modularity by explicitly incorporating fairness, and we prove that minimizing it yields naturally fair partitions for protected groups while maintaining theoretical soundness. We develop a general optimization framework for fairness partitioning and design the efficient Fair Fast Newman (FairFN) algorithm, enhancing the Fast Newman (FN) method to optimize both modularity and fairness. Experiments show FairFN achieves significantly improved fairness and high-quality partitions compared to state-of-the-art methods, especially on unbalanced datasets.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_22684
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Recovering Fairness Directly from Modularity: a New Way for Fair Community Partitioning
Wang, Yufeng
Bai, Yiguang
Zhu, Tianqing
Ayed, Ismail Ben
Yuan, Jing
Social and Information Networks
Machine Learning
Community partitioning is crucial in network analysis, with modularity optimization being the prevailing technique. However, traditional modularity-based methods often overlook fairness, a critical aspect in real-world applications. To address this, we introduce protected group networks and propose a novel fairness-modularity metric. This metric extends traditional modularity by explicitly incorporating fairness, and we prove that minimizing it yields naturally fair partitions for protected groups while maintaining theoretical soundness. We develop a general optimization framework for fairness partitioning and design the efficient Fair Fast Newman (FairFN) algorithm, enhancing the Fast Newman (FN) method to optimize both modularity and fairness. Experiments show FairFN achieves significantly improved fairness and high-quality partitions compared to state-of-the-art methods, especially on unbalanced datasets.
title Recovering Fairness Directly from Modularity: a New Way for Fair Community Partitioning
topic Social and Information Networks
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.22684