Locating Structural Centers: A Density-Based Clustering Method for Community Detection

PLoS One. 2017 Jan 3;12(1):e0169355. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0169355. eCollection 2017.

Abstract

Uncovering underlying community structures in complex networks has received considerable attention because of its importance in understanding structural attributes and group characteristics of networks. The algorithmic identification of such structures is a significant challenge. Local expanding methods have proven to be efficient and effective in community detection, but most methods are sensitive to initial seeds and built-in parameters. In this paper, we present a local expansion method by density-based clustering, which aims to uncover the intrinsic network communities by locating the structural centers of communities based on a proposed structural centrality. The structural centrality takes into account local density of nodes and relative distance between nodes. The proposed algorithm expands a community from the structural center to the border with a single local search procedure. The local expanding procedure follows a heuristic strategy as allowing it to find complete community structures. Moreover, it can identify different node roles (cores and outliers) in communities by defining a border region. The experiments involve both on real-world and artificial networks, and give a comparison view to evaluate the proposed method. The result of these experiments shows that the proposed method performs more efficiently with a comparative clustering performance than current state of the art methods.

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms
  • Cluster Analysis
  • Residence Characteristics*

Grants and funding

This work is supported by National 973 Key Basic Research Program of China (2013CB329603) (http://www.973.gov.cn/English/Index.aspx) (JL), and National Natural Science Foundation of China with Grant No. 61472248 and No. 61431008 (http://www.nsfc.gov.cn/publish/portal1/) (JL). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.