HI Tamás,

Thank you very much for your prompt and thorough answer.
I will take care to use the same PC on my work :)

All the bests

Franz

2013/2/11 Tamás Nepusz <[email protected]>

> > I am doing some research on networks and I find that
> fastgreedy.community returns different results when run on different PC.
> fastgreedy.community is not fully deterministic because the original
> algorithm does not specify what should happen when more than one possible
> merge of communities would yield exactly the same increase in the
> modularity score. igraph chooses one of the possible merges quasi-randomly.
> "Quasi-randomly" means that there are no explicitly generated random
> numbers involved (the algorithm will always give the same result on the
> same machine), but it is unpredictable which of the possible merges igraph
> will perform. It is quite likely that in your case igraph chooses one of
> the possible merges on one machine and another one of the possible merges
> on another machine. Since the two merges are equivalent "locally" (they
> yield the same local increase in modularity) but not "globally" (one of
> them leads to a more advantageous situation than the other), it can happen
> that the final result differs both in terms of the number of communities
> and in terms of the actual modularity score.
>
> To illustrate one possible source of randomness: igraph maintains a list
> of "neighboring communities" for each community and sorts the list by
> modularity gain in descending order. Sorting is done by the qsort function
> of the standard C library. Different qsort implementations may break ties
> in different ways; for instance, the man page of qsort on my machine says
> this:
>
> "The algorithms implemented by qsort(), qsort_r(), and heapsort() are not
> stable; that is, if two
> members compare as equal, their order in the sorted array is undefined."
>
> This can easily lead to the behaviour I described above.
>
> Best,
> Tamas
>
>
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