A Unified Community Detection Algorithm In Large-Scale Complex Networks

A community is the basic component structure of complex networks and is important for network analysis. In recent decades, researchers from different fields have witnessed a boom of community detection, and many algorithms were proposed to retrieve disjoint or overlapping communities. In this paper, a unified expansion approach is proposed to obtain two different network partitions, which can provide divisions with higher accuracies and have high scalability in large-scale networks. First, we define the edge intensity to quantify the densities of network edges, a higher edge intensity indicates a more compact pair of nodes. Second, vertices of higher density edges are extracted out and denoted as core nodes, whereas other vertices are treated as margin nodes; finally we apply an expansion strategy to form disjoint communities: closely connected core nodes are combined as disjoint skeleton communities, and margin nodes are gradually attached to the nearest skeleton communities. To detect overlapping communities, extra steps are adopted: potential overlapping nodes are identified from the existing disjoint communities and replicated; and communities that bear replicas are further partitioned into smaller clusters. Because replicas of potential overlapping nodes might remain in different communities, overlapping communities can be acquired. Experimental results on real and synthetic networks illustrate higher accuracy and better performance of our method.