https://doi.org/10.1140/epjb/e2012-30015-5
Regular Article
Identifying overlapping communities in social networks using multi-scale local information expansion
1
Academy of Mathematics and Systems Science, Chinese Academy of
Sciences, Beijing
100190, P.R.
China
2
National Center for Mathematics and Interdisciplinary Sciences,
Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing
100190, P.R.
China
3
Key Laboratory of Random Complex Structures and Data Science,
Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing
100190, P.R.
China
4
Key Laboratory of Systems Biology, Shanghai Institutes for
Biological Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai
200233, P.R.
China
5
Collaborative Research Center for Innovative Mathematical
Modelling, Institute of Industrial Science, University of Tokyo,
153-8505
Tokyo,
Japan
a e-mail: lnchen@sibs.ac.cn
b e-mail: zxs@amt.ac.cn
Received:
6
January
2012
Received in final form:
1
April
2012
Published online:
6
June
2012
Most existing approaches for community detection require complete information of the graph in a specific scale, which is impractical for many social networks. We propose a novel algorithm that does not embrace the universal approach but instead of trying to focus on local social ties and modeling multi-scales of social interactions occurring in those networks. Our method for the first time optimizes the topological entropy of a network and uncovers communities through a novel dynamic system converging to a local minimum by simply updating the membership vector with very low computational complexity. It naturally supports overlapping communities through associating each node with a membership vector which describes node’s involvement in each community. Furthermore, different multi-scale partitions can be obtained by tuning the characteristic size of modules from the optimal partition. Because of the high efficiency and accuracy of the algorithm, it is feasible to be used for the accurate detection of community structures in real networks.
Key words: Statistical and Nonlinear Physics
© EDP Sciences, Società Italiana di Fisica and Springer-Verlag, 2012