An Information-Theoretic Approach for Detecting Community Structure Based on Network Representation

Abstract

Community structure is a network characteristic where nodes can be naturally divided into densely connected groups. Community structures are ubiquitous in social, biological, and technological networks. Revealing community structure in the network helps in the understanding of the topological associations and interactions of elements in the network, as well as helping to mine their potential information. However, this has been proven to be a difficult challenge. On the one hand, this is because there is no unified definition of the quality of a community; on the other hand, due to the complexity of the network, it is impossible to traverse all the possibilities of community partitions to find the best one. Aiming at performing high-accuracy community detection, an information-theoretic approach AMI-NRL was proposed. The approach first constructs a community evolution process based on the representation of the target network, then finds the most stable community structure during the evolution using an average-mutual-information-based criterion. The experiments show that the approach can effectively detect community structures on real-world datasets and synthetic datasets.

Keywords

• community detection
• network representation
• average mutual information
• network clustering
• information entropy