Overlapping community detection using a generative model for networks

Detecting overlapping communities is a challenging task in analyzing networks, where nodes may belong to more than one community. Many present methods optimize quality functions to extract the communities from a network. In this paper, we present a probabilistic method for detecting overlapping communities using a generative model. The model describes the probability of generating a network with the model parameters, which reflect the communities in the network. The community memberships of each node are determined based on a probabilistic approach using those model parameters, whose values can be obtained by fitting the model to the network. This method has the advantage that the node participation degrees in each community are also computed. The proposed method is compared with some other community detection methods on both synthetic networks and real-world networks. The experiments show that this method is efficient at detecting overlapping communities and can provide better performance on the networks where a majority of nodes belong to more than one community.     

Efficient overlapping community detection in huge real-world networks

The detection of overlapping community structure in networks can give insight into the structures and functions of many complex systems. In this paper, we propose a simple but efficient overlapping community detection method for very large real-world networks. Taking a high-quality, non-overlapping partition generated by existing, efficient, non-overlapping community detection methods as input, our method identifies overlapping nodes between each pair of connected non-overlapping communities in turn. Through our analysis on modularity, we deduce that, to become an overlapping node without demolishing modularity, nodes should satisfy a specific condition presented in this paper. The proposed algorithm outputs high quality overlapping communities by efficiently identifying overlapping nodes that satisfy the above condition. Experiments on synthetic and real-world networks show that in most cases our method is better than other algorithms either in the quality of results or the computational performance. In some cases, our method is the only one that can produce overlapping communities in the very large real-world networks used in the experiments.     

Feature Analysis and Modeling of the Network Community Structure

Community structure has an important influence on the structural and dynamic characteristics of the complex systems.So it has attracted a large number of researchers.However,due to its complexity,the mechanism of action of the community structure is still not clear to this day.In this paper,some features of the community structure have been discussed.And a constraint model of the community has been deduced.This model is effective to identify the communities.And especially,it is effective to identify the overlapping nodes between the communities.Then a community detection algorithm,which has linear time complexity,is proposed based on this constraint model,a proposed node similarity model and the Modularity Q.Through some experiments on a series of real-world and synthetic networks,the high performances of the algorithm and the constraint model have been illustrated.     

Detecting overlapping communities of weighted networks via a local algorithm

Identification of communities is significant in understanding the structures and functions of networks. Since some nodes naturally belong to several communities, the study of overlapping communities has attracted increasing attention recently, and many algorithms have been designed to detect overlapping communities. In this paper, an overlapping communities detecting algorithm is proposed whose main strategies are finding an initial partial community from a node with maximal node strength and adding tight nodes to expand the partial community. Seven real-world complex networks and one synthetic network are used to evaluate the algorithm. Experimental results demonstrate that the algorithm proposed is efficient for detecting overlapping communities in weighted networks.     

Fuzzy overlapping community detection based on local random walk and multidimensional scaling

A fuzzy overlapping community is an important kind of overlapping community in which each node belongs to each community to different extents. It exists in many real networks but how to identify a fuzzy overlapping community is still a challenging task. In this work, the concept of local random walk and a new distance metric are introduced. Based on the new distance measurement, the dissimilarity index between each node of a network is calculated firstly. Then in order to keep the original node distance as much as possible, the network structure is mapped into low-dimensional space by the multidimensional scaling (MDS). Finally, the fuzzy c$c$-means clustering is employed to find fuzzy communities in a network. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm is effective and efficient to identify the fuzzy overlapping communities in both artificial networks and real-world networks.     

Detecting community structure in complex networks via node similarity

The detection of the community structure in networks is beneficial to understand the network structure and to analyze the network properties. Based on node similarity, a fast and efficient method for detecting community structure is proposed, which discovers the community structure by iteratively incorporating the community containing a node with the communities that contain the nodes with maximum similarity to this node to form a new community. The presented method has low computational complexity because of requiring only the local information of the network, and it does not need any prior knowledge about the communities and its detection results are robust on the selection of the initial node. Some real-world and computer-generated networks are used to evaluate the performance of the presented method. The simulation results demonstrate that this method is efficient to detect community structure in complex networks, and the ZLZ metrics used in the proposed method is the most suitable one among local indices in community detection.     

A local fuzzy method based on “p-strong” community for detecting communities in networks

In this paper,we propose a local fuzzy method based on the idea of "p-strong" community to detect the disjoint and overlapping communities in networks.In the method,a refined agglomeration rule is designed for agglomerating nodes into local communities,and the overlapping nodes are detected based on the idea of making each community strong.We propose a contribution coefficient b_v~(ci)to measure the contribution of an overlapping node to each of its belonging communities,and the fuzzy coefficients of the overlapping node can be obtained by normalizing the b_v~(ci) to all its belonging communities.The running time of our method is analyzed and varies linearly with network size.We investigate our method on the computergenerated networks and real networks.The testing results indicate that the accuracy of our method in detecting disjoint communities is higher than those of the existing local methods and our method is efficient for detecting the overlapping nodes with fuzzy coefficients.Furthermore,the local optimizing scheme used in our method allows us to partly solve the resolution problem of the global modularity.     

Detecting overlapping communities by seed community in weighted complex networks

Detection of community structures in the weighted complex networks is significant to understand the network structures and analysis of the network properties. We present a unique algorithm to detect overlapping communities in the weighted complex networks with considerable accuracy. For a given weighted network, all the seed communities are first extracted. Then to each seed community, more community members are absorbed using the absorbing degree function. In addition, our algorithm successfully finds common nodes between communities. The experiments using some real-world networks show that the performance of our algorithm is satisfactory.     

Detecting overlapping communities based on vital nodes in complex networks

Detection of community structures in the complex networks is significant to understand the network structures and analyze the network properties. However, it is still a problem on how to select initial seeds as well as to determine the number of communities. In this paper, we proposed the detecting overlapping communities based on vital nodes algorithm(DOCBVA), an algorithm based on vital nodes and initial seeds to detect overlapping communities. First, through some screening method, we find the vital nodes and then the seed communities through the pretreatment of vital nodes. This process differs from most existing methods, and the speed is faster. Then the seeds will be extended. We also adopt a new parameter of attribution degree to extend the seeds and find the overlapping communities. Finally, the remaining nodes that have not been processed in the first two steps will be reprocessed. The number of communities is likely to change until the end of algorithm. The experimental results using some real-world network data and artificial network data are satisfactory and can prove the superiority of the DOCBVA algorithm.     

Detection of node group membership in networks with group overlap

Most networks found in social and biochemical systems have modular structures. An important question prompted by the modularity of these networks is whether nodes can be said to belong to a single group. If they cannot, we would need to consider the role of “overlapping communities.” Despite some efforts in this direction, the problem of detecting overlapping groups remains unsolved because there is neither a formal definition of overlapping community, nor an ensemble of networks with which to test the performance of group detection algorithms when nodes can belong to more than one group. Here, we introduce an ensemble of networks with overlapping groups. We then apply three group identification methods – modularity maximization, k-clique percolation, and modularity-landscape surveying – to these networks. We find that the modularity-landscape surveying method is the only one able to detect heterogeneities in node memberships, and that those heterogeneities are only detectable when the overlap is small. Surprisingly, we find that the k-clique percolation method is unable to detect node membership for the overlapping case.     

Overlapping Community Detection Based on Membership Degree Propagation

A community in a complex network refers to a group of nodes that are densely connected internally but with only sparse connections to the outside. Overlapping community structures are ubiquitous in real-world networks, where each node belongs to at least one community. Therefore, overlapping community detection is an important topic in complex network research. This paper proposes an overlapping community detection algorithm based on membership degree propagation that is driven by both global and local information of the node community. In the method, we introduce a concept of membership degree, which not only stores the label information, but also the degrees of the node belonging to the labels. Then the conventional label propagation process could be extended to membership degree propagation, with the results mapped directly to the overlapping community division. Therefore, it obtains the partition result and overlapping node identification simultaneously and greatly reduces the computational time. The proposed algorithm was applied to a synthetic Lancichinetti–Fortunato–Radicchi (LFR) dataset and nine real-world datasets and compared with other up-to-date algorithms. The experimental results show that our proposed algorithm is effective and outperforms the comparison methods on most datasets. Our proposed method significantly improved the accuracy and speed of the overlapping node prediction. It can also substantially alleviate the computational complexity of community structure detection in general.     

Overlapping community detection using weighted consensus clustering

Many overlapping community detection algorithms have been proposed. Most of them are unstable and behave non-deterministically. In this paper, we use weighted consensus clustering for combining multiple base covers obtained by classic non-deterministic algorithms to improve the quality of the results. We first evaluate a reliability measure for each community in all base covers and assign a proportional weight to each one. Then we redefine the consensus matrix that takes into account not only the common membership of nodes, but also the reliability of the communities. Experimental results on both artificial and real-world networks show that our algorithm can find overlapping communities accurately.     

Detecting overlapping communities in networks via dominant label propagation

Community detection is an important methodology for understanding the intrinsic structure and function of a realworld network.In this paper,we propose an effective and efficient algorithm,called Dominant Label Propagation Algorithm(Abbreviated as DLPA),to detect communities in complex networks.The algorithm simulates a special voting process to detect overlapping and non-overlapping community structure in complex networks simultaneously.Our algorithm is very efficient,since its computational complexity is almost linear to the number of edges in the network.Experimental results on both real-world and synthetic networks show that our algorithm also possesses high accuracies on detecting community structure in networks.     

Detecting local community structures in complex networks based on local degree central nodes

Detecting local communities in real-world graphs such as large social networks, web graphs, and biological networks has received a great deal of attention because obtaining complete information from a large network is still difficult and unrealistic nowadays. In this paper, we define the term local degree central node whose degree is greater than or equal to the degree of its neighbor nodes. A new method based on the local degree central node to detect the local community is proposed. In our method, the local community is not discovered from the given starting node, but from the local degree central node that is associated with the given starting node. Experiments show that the local central nodes are key nodes of communities in complex networks and the local communities detected by our method have high accuracy. Our algorithm can discover local communities accurately for more nodes and is an effective method to explore community structures of large networks.     

基于联合矩阵分解的节点多属性网络社团检测

发现复杂网络中的社团结构在社会网络、生物组织网络和在线网络等复杂网络中具备十分重要的意义. 针对社交媒体网络的社团检测通常需要利用两种信息源: 网络拓扑结构特征和节点属性特征, 丰富的节点内容属性信息为社团检测的增加了灵活性和挑战. 传统方法是要么仅针对这两者信息之一进行单独挖掘, 或者将两者信息得到的社团结果进行线性叠加判决, 不能有效进行信息源的融合. 本文将节点的多维属性特征作为社团划分的一种有效协同学习项进行研究, 将两者信息源进行融合分析, 提出了一种基于联合矩阵分解的节点多属性网络社团检测算法CDJMF, 提高了社团检测的有效性和鲁棒性. 实验表明, 本文所提的方法能够有效利用节点的属性信息指导社团检测, 具备更高的社团划分质量.     

Modularity functions maximization with nonnegative relaxation facilitates community detection in networks

We show here that the problem of maximizing a family of quantitative functions, encompassing both the modularity (Q-measure) and modularity density (D-measure), for community detection can be uniformly understood as a combinatoric optimization involving the trace of a matrix called modularity Laplacian. Instead of using traditional spectral relaxation, we apply additional nonnegative constraint into this graph clustering problem and design efficient algorithms to optimize the new objective. With the explicit nonnegative constraint, our solutions are very close to the ideal community indicator matrix and can directly assign nodes into communities. The near-orthogonal columns of the solution can be reformulated as the posterior probability of corresponding node belonging to each community. Therefore, the proposed method can be exploited to identify the fuzzy or overlapping communities and thus facilitates the understanding of the intrinsic structure of networks. Experimental results show that our new algorithm consistently, sometimes significantly, outperforms the traditional spectral relaxation approaches.     

Adjusting from disjoint to overlapping community detection of complex networks

The investigation of community structures is one of the most important problems in the field of complex networks and has countless applications in different disciplines: biology, computer, social sciences, etc. Many community detection algorithms have been developed in various fields recently. The vast majority of these algorithms only find disjoint communities; however, in many real-world networks communities often overlap to some extent. In this paper, we propose an efficient method for adjusting these classical algorithms to match the requirement for discovering overlapping communities in complex networks, which is based on a local definition of community strength. The method can in principle be applied with any clustering algorithm. Tests on a set of computer generated and real-world networks give excellent results. In particular, we show that the method can also allow one to availably analyze the problem of unstable nodes in community detection, which is very helpful for understanding the structural properties of the networks correctly and comprehensively.     

LPA-MNI: An Improved Label Propagation Algorithm Based on Modularity and Node Importance for Community Detection

Community detection is of great significance in understanding the structure of the network. Label propagation algorithm (LPA) is a classical and effective method, but it has the problems of randomness and instability. An improved label propagation algorithm named LPA-MNI is proposed in this study by combining the modularity function and node importance with the original LPA. LPA-MNI first identify the initial communities according to the value of modularity. Subsequently, the label propagation is used to cluster the remaining nodes that have not been assigned to initial communities. Meanwhile, node importance is used to improve the node order of label updating and the mechanism of label selecting when multiple labels are contained by the maximum number of nodes. Extensive experiments are performed on twelve real-world networks and eight groups of synthetic networks, and the results show that LPA-MNI has better accuracy, higher modularity, and more reasonable community numbers when compared with other six algorithms. In addition, LPA-MNI is shown to be more robust than the traditional LPA algorithm.     

Minimum spanning trees for community detection

A simple deterministic algorithm for community detection is provided by using two rounds of minimum spanning trees. By comparing the first round minimum spanning tree (1st-MST) with the second round spanning tree (2nd-MST) of the network, communities are detected and their overlapping nodes are also identified. To generate the two MSTs, a distance matrix is defined and computed from the adjacent matrix of the network. Compared with the resistance matrix or the communicability matrix used in community detection in the literature, the proposed distance matrix is very simple in computation. The proposed algorithm is tested on real world social networks, graphs which are failed by the modularity maximization, and the LFR benchmark graphs for community detection.     

A thermal flux-diffusing model for complex networks and its applications in community structure detection

We introduce a thermal flux-diffusing model for complex networks. Based on this model, we propose a physical method to detect the communities in the complex networks. The method allows us to obtain the temperature distribution of nodes in time that scales linearly with the network size. Then, the local community enclosing a given node can be easily detected for the reason that the dense connections in the local communities lead to the temperatures of nodes in the same community being close to each other. The community structure of a network can be recursively detected by randomly choosing the nodes outside the detected local communities. In the experiments, we apply our method to a set of benchmarking networks with known pre-determined community structures. The experiment results show that our method has higher accuracy and precision than most existing globe methods and is better than the other existing local methods in the selection of the initial node. Finally, several real-world networks are investigated.