Transfer distance between partitions and search of dense zones in graphs

This text summarizes the Ph.D. thesis defended by the author in November 2006 under the supervision of Olivier Hudry, at the Université Paris 1. The thesis is written in French and can be obtained from the author upon request. The first part of the thesis is mainly devoted to the study of distances between partitions, and more precisely to the transfer distance. In the second part, we design a method for overlapping clustering and we apply it to protein interactions networks.