Constructing Robust Community Structure Against Edge-Based Attacks

The community structure often represents potential functionalities of systems and plays a crucial role in realistic applications. As indicated by previous studies, it is of significance to preserve the allocations of members in networks even when attacks and errors occur, and there has been much progress in studying community robustness toward nodal attacks. Meanwhile, both nodes and links are necessary to the normal function of networked systems, and the evaluation and optimization method aiming at edge-based attacks in communities is crucial as well. However, few of the existing studies have focused on such an urgent topic. Therefore, in this paper, we manage to deal with constructing robust community structures withstanding edge-based failures. A measure evaluating the community robustness against edge-based attacks is designed first, and an optimization algorithm, termed MA-Rcom, has been devised to enhance the edge-based community robustness. The experimental results on several synthetic and real-world networks show that MA-Rcom is effective and reliable in the optimization process; meanwhile, the original community partition information can be also preserved well. Furthermore, in order to design a comprehensively robust community structure against both node-based and edge-based attacks, the modified MA-Rcom is designed and validated. Toward community robustness in terms of edge attacks, this paper provides a valid measure to evaluate and compare the reliability of networked systems; furthermore, the proposed optimization algorithm is effective in enhancing the performance of networks, and the obtained results are potentially valuable for solving realistic dilemmas.