A Novel Community Detection Algorithm Based on Local Similarity of Clustering Coefficient in Social Networks

Abstract

Community structures are integral and independent parts in a network. Community detection plays an important role in social networks for understanding the structure and predicting user behaviors. Many algorithms have been devised for accurate and efficient community detecting, but there are few community detection algorithms using node similarity. In most real-world networks, nodes tend to create tightly knit groups characterized by a relatively high density of ties. The higher the clustering coefficient of a node, the more aggregative the neighboring nodes are. In this paper, we propose an adjacent node similarity optimization combination connectivity algorithm (ASOCCA) for accurate community detection. ASOCCA utilizes the local similarity measure based on clustering coefficient to identify the closest neighbors of each node, then obtains several sets of connected components by combining different pairs of nodes, and finally forms initial communities. In addition, the community merging strategy is applied to further optimize the community structure. To evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm, six real-world networks and two LFR networks with diverse network size are used to compare ASOCCA with five state-of-the-art community detection algorithms. The experimental results show that ASOCCA achieves better detection accuracy than several existing algorithms.

Keywords

• Social networks
• community detection
• local similarity
• merging strategy