Abstract
Networks (or graphs) are used to model the dyadic relations between entities in complex systems. Analyzing the properties of the networks reveal important characteristics of the underlying system. However, in many disciplines, including social sciences, bioinformatics, and technological systems, multiple relations exist between entities. In such cases, a simple graph is not sufficient to model these multiple relations, and a multilayer network is a more appropriate model. In this paper, we explore community detection in multilayer networks. Specifically, we propose a novel network decoupling strategy for efficiently combining the communities in the different layers using the Boolean primitives AND, OR, and NOT. Our proposed method, network decoupling, is based on analyzing the communities in each network layer individually and then aggregating the analysis results. We (i) describe our network decoupling algorithms for finding communities, (ii) present how network decoupling can be used to express different types of communities in multilayer networks, and (iii) demonstrate the effectiveness of using network decoupling for detecting communities in real-world and synthetic data sets. Compared to other algorithms for detecting communities in multilayer networks, our proposed network decoupling method requires significantly lower computation time while producing results of high accuracy. Based on these results, we anticipate that our proposed network decoupling technique will enable a more detailed analysis of multilayer networks in an efficient manner.