Benchmarking overlapping community detection methods for applications in human connectomics

Abstract Brain networks exhibit non-trivial modular organization, with groups of densely connected areas participating in specialized functions. Traditional community detection algorithms assign each node to one module, but this representation cannot capture integrative, multi-functional nodes that span multiple communities. Despite the increasing availability of overlapping community detection algorithms (OCDAs) to capture such integrative nodes, there is no objective procedure for selecting the most appropriate method and its parameters for a given problem. Here we overcome this limitation by introducing a data-driven method for selecting an OCDA and its parameters from performance on a tailored ensemble of generated benchmark networks, assessing 22 unique algorithms and parameter settings. Applied to the human right-hemisphere structural connectome, we find that the 'Order Statistics Local Optimization Method' (OSLOM) best identifies ground-truth overlapping structure in the benchmark ensemble, yielding a seven-network decomposition of the right-hemisphere cortex. These modules are bridged by fifteen overlapping regions that generally sit at the apex of the putative cortical hierarchy–suggesting integrative, higher-order function–with network participation increasing along the cortical hierarchy, a finding not supported using a non-overlapping modular decomposition. This data-driven approach to selecting OCDAs is applicable across domains, opening new avenues to detecting and quantifying informative structures in complex real-world networks.