MOUFLON: Multi-group Modularity-based Fairness-aware Community Detection

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Panayiotou, Georgios, Simon, Anand Mathew Muthukulam, Magnani, Matteo, Calikus, Ece
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Panayiotou, Georgios
Simon, Anand Mathew Muthukulam
Magnani, Matteo
Calikus, Ece
author_facet Panayiotou, Georgios
Simon, Anand Mathew Muthukulam
Magnani, Matteo
Calikus, Ece
contents In this paper, we propose MOUFLON, a fairness-aware, modularity-based community detection method that allows adjusting the importance of partition quality over fairness outcomes. MOUFLON uses a novel proportional balance fairness metric, providing consistent and comparable fairness scores across multi-group and imbalanced network settings. We evaluate our method under both synthetic and real network datasets, focusing on performance and the trade-off between modularity and fairness in the resulting communities, along with the impact of network characteristics such as size, density, and group distribution. As structural biases can lead to strong alignment between demographic groups and network structure, we also examine scenarios with highly clustered homogeneous groups, to understand how such structures influence fairness outcomes. Our findings showcase the effects of incorporating fairness constraints into modularity-based community detection, and highlight key considerations for designing and benchmarking fairness-aware social network analysis methods.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_12348
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle MOUFLON: Multi-group Modularity-based Fairness-aware Community Detection
Panayiotou, Georgios
Simon, Anand Mathew Muthukulam
Magnani, Matteo
Calikus, Ece
Social and Information Networks
In this paper, we propose MOUFLON, a fairness-aware, modularity-based community detection method that allows adjusting the importance of partition quality over fairness outcomes. MOUFLON uses a novel proportional balance fairness metric, providing consistent and comparable fairness scores across multi-group and imbalanced network settings. We evaluate our method under both synthetic and real network datasets, focusing on performance and the trade-off between modularity and fairness in the resulting communities, along with the impact of network characteristics such as size, density, and group distribution. As structural biases can lead to strong alignment between demographic groups and network structure, we also examine scenarios with highly clustered homogeneous groups, to understand how such structures influence fairness outcomes. Our findings showcase the effects of incorporating fairness constraints into modularity-based community detection, and highlight key considerations for designing and benchmarking fairness-aware social network analysis methods.
title MOUFLON: Multi-group Modularity-based Fairness-aware Community Detection
topic Social and Information Networks
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.12348