Detecting Communities by Revised Max-flow Method in Networks

A ubiquitous phenomenon in networks is the presence of communities within which the network connections are dense and between which they are sparser. This paper proposes a max-flow algorithm in bipartite networks to detect communities in general networks. Firstly, we construct a bipartite network in accordance with a general network and derive a revised max-flow problem in order to uncover the community structure. Then we present a local heuristic algorithm to find the optimal solution of the revised max-flow problem. This method is applied to a variety of real-world and artificial complex networks, and the partition results confirm its effectiveness and accuracy.