  We propose a simple method to extract the community structure of large
networks. Our method is a heuristic method that is based on modularity
optimization. It is shown to outperform all other known community detection
method in terms of computation time. Moreover, the quality of the communities
detected is very good, as measured by the so-called modularity. This is shown
first by identifying language communities in a Belgian mobile phone network of
2.6 million customers and by analyzing a web graph of 118 million nodes and
more than one billion links. The accuracy of our algorithm is also verified on
ad-hoc modular networks. .
