  Community detection methods have so far been tested mostly on small empirical
networks and on synthetic benchmarks. Much less is known about their
performance on large real-world networks, which nonetheless are a significant
target for application. We analyze the performance of three state-of-the-art
community detection methods by using them to identify communities in a large
social network constructed from mobile phone call records. We find that all
methods detect communities that are meaningful in some respects but fall short
in others, and that there often is a hierarchical relationship between
communities detected by different methods. Our results suggest that community
detection methods could be useful in studying the general mesoscale structure
of networks, as opposed to only trying to identify dense structures.
