Open Access

Natasa Djurdjevac Conrad, Elisa Tonello, Johannes Zonker, Heike Siebert

• Temporal networks are a powerful tool for studying the dynamic nature of a wide range of real-world complex systems, including social, biological and physical systems. In particular, detection of dynamic communities within these networks can help identify important cohesive structures and fundamental mechanisms driving systems behaviour. However, when working with real-world systems, available data is often limited and sparse, due to missing data on systems entities, their evolution and interactions, as well as uncertainty regarding temporal resolution. This can hinder accurate representation of the system over time and result in incomplete or biased community dynamics. In this paper, we compare established methods for community detection and, using synthetic data experiments and real-world case studies, we evaluate the impact of data sparsity on the quality of identified dynamic communities. Our results give valuable insights on the evolution of systems with sparse data, which are less studied in existing literature, but are frequently encountered in real-world applications.