Community structure revealed by phase locking

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel scheme based on phase locking in the Kuramoto model to detect community structures in complex networks by isolating local synchronization from collective synchronization.

Contribution

It proposes a new method to reveal community structures through phase locking, enhancing community detection by analyzing synchronization paths and overlaps.

Findings

Community detection is more accurate than modularity-based algorithms.

The scheme effectively isolates local synchronization, revealing clear community structures.

Analysis of synchronization paths uncovers overlaps among communities.

Abstract

Community structure can naturally emerge in paths to synchronization, and scratching it from the paths is a tough issue that accounts for the diverse dynamics of synchronization. In this paper, with assumption that the synchronization on complex networks is made up of local and collective processes, we proposed a scheme to lock the local synchronization (phase locking) at a stable state meanwhile suppress the collective synchronization based on Kuramoto model. Through this scheme, the network dynamics only contains the local synchronization, which suggests that the nodes in the same community synchronize together and these synchronization clusters well reveal the community structure of network. Furthermore, by analyzing the paths to synchronization, the relations or overlaps among different communities are also obtained. Thus, the community detection based on the scheme is performed on five real networks and the observed community structures are much more apparent than modularity-based fast algorithm. Our results not only provide a deep insight to understand the synchronization dynamics on complex network but also enlarge the research scope of community detection.