Local Community Detection in Complex Networks Based on Maximum Cliques Extension

Detecting local community structure in complex networks is an appealing problem that has attracted increasing attention in various domains. However, most of the current local community detection algorithms, on one hand, are influenced by the state of the source node and, on the other hand, cannot effectively identify the multiple communities linked with the overlapping nodes. We proposed a novel local community detection algorithm based on maximum clique extension called LCD-MC. The proposed method firstly finds the set of all the maximum cliques containing the source node and initializes them as the starting local communities; then, it extends each unclassified local community by greedy optimization until a certain objective is satisfied; finally, the expected local communities will be obtained until all maximum cliques are assigned into a community. An empirical evaluation using both synthetic and real datasets demonstrates that our algorithm has a superior performance to some of the state-of-the-art approaches.