Overlapping Community Detection via Leader-Based Local Expansion in Social Networks

Most community detection algorithms are trying to obtain the global information of the network. But increasingly large scale of the current network makes accessing to global information very difficult. In the meanwhile, the network shows power-law distribution and sparse features. And local community mining algorithms which use these features have more advantages over global mining methods. In this paper, we proposed a local community detection algorithm based on the core members named LLCDA (Leader based Local Community Detecting Algorithm) which uses local structural information in the network to optimize a local objective function. A local community can be detected through continuous optimization of the function by expanding from an initial core member computed by a modified PageRank sorting algorithm. The proposed LLCDA algorithm has been tested on both synthetic and real world networks, and it has been compared with other community detecting algorithms. The experimental results validated our proposed LLCDA and showed that significant improvements have been achieved by this technique.