Figure 1

Here we show five networks whose nodes are coloured according to their communities found using modularity. We illustrate the different behaviours of three network comparison methodologies: the Jaccard distance (graph editing), the Spectral distance (eigenvalues) and the NMI distance (partitions). Subfigure (F) shows the ranking of these similarity metrics for network pairs from closest (top) to furthest (bottom). Notice that standard community comparison metrics like NMI do not differentiate between pair A–B and pair A–C since they ignore the underlying structure and consider exclusively the partitions