  To understand the structure of a large-scale biological, social, or
technological network, it can be helpful to decompose the network into smaller
subunits or modules. In this article, we develop an information-theoretic
foundation for the concept of modularity in networks. We identify the modules
of which the network is composed by finding an optimal compression of its
topology, capitalizing on regularities in its structure. We explain the
advantages of this approach and illustrate them by partitioning a number of
real-world and model networks.
