Force-Based Incremental Algorithm for Mining Community Structure in Dynamic Network

Community structure is an important property of network. Being able to identify communities can provide invaluable help in exploiting and understanding both social and non-social networks. Several algorithms have been developed up till now. However, all these algorithms can work well only with small or moderate networks with vertexes of order 104. Besides, all the existing algorithms are off-line and cannot work well with highly dynamic networks such as web, in which web pages are updated frequently. When an already clustered network is updated, the entire network including original and incremental parts has to be recalculated, even though only slight changes are involved. To address this problem, an incremental algorithm is proposed, which allows for mining community structure in large-scale and dynamic networks. Based on the community structure detected previously, the algorithm takes little time to reclassify the entire network including both the original and incremental parts. Furthermore, the algorithm is faster than most of the existing algorithms such as Girvan and Newman＇s algorithm and its improved versions. Also, the algorithm can help to visualize these community structures in network and provide a new approach to research on the evolving process of dynamic networks.

Force-Based Incremental Algorithm for Mining Community Structure in Dynamic Network

Community structure is an important property of network. Being able to identify communities can provide invaluable help in exploiting and understanding both social and non-social networks. Several algorithms have been developed up till now. However, all these algorithms can work well only with small or moderate networks with vertexes of order 104. Besides, all the existing algorithms are off-line and cannot work well with highly dynamic networks such as web, in which web pages are updated frequently. When an already clustered network is updated, the entire network including original and incremental parts has to be recalculated, even though only slight changes are involved. To address this problem, an incremental algorithm is proposed, which allows for mining community structure in large-scale and dynamic networks. Based on the community structure detected previously, the algorithm takes little time to reclassify the entire network including both the original and incremental parts. Furthermore, the algorithm is faster than most of the existing algorithms such as Girvan and Newman's algorithm and its improved versions. Also, the algorithm can help to visualize these community structures in network and provide a new approach to research on the evolving process of dynamic networks.