Influence-Based Community Partition with DegreeRank Label Propagation (DRLP) Algorithm for Social Networks

Abstract

Community detection is increasingly important in social networks with the rapid growth of big data, which provides a deep understanding of the mesoscopic structure of social networks. In this article, we propose a label improvement algorithm, DegreeRank Label Propagation (DRLP), which is based on the degree centrality of nodes and adopts a PageRank optimization strategy. We present a damping factor reflecting the affinity between nodes, which can be adjusted to affect the change of affinity between nodes caused by unexpected events, aiming to simulate interpersonal communication in real networks. Next, a novel importance index is designed for nodes to solve the random problem of existing similar algorithms by globalizing the local characteristics of nodes. We also develop an update algorithm with low time complexity during the label selection process to ensure the sum of influence propagation is maximized within each community. Experimental results verify that the algorithm achieves stable and excellent community partitioning results on real network datasets and artificial synthetic networks. Especially in large and medium-sized networks, our method demonstrates higher accuracy and better performance in terms of normalized mutual information (NMI) and modularity than other methods.

Keywords

• community detection
• DegreeRank Label Propagation
• node importance
• complex networks