Community Detection in Complex Networks Using Density-based Clustering Algorithm

TL;DR

This paper introduces IsoFdp, a novel community detection method combining Isomap and density-based clustering, which automatically identifies communities in networks without prior parameter settings.

Contribution

The paper proposes IsoFdp, integrating Isomap with Fdp for effective community detection and an improved partition density function for automatic community number selection.

Findings

Effective detection of communities in synthetic networks

Outperforms state-of-the-art methods on real-world networks

Automatically determines the number of communities

Abstract

Like clustering analysis, community detection aims at assigning nodes in a network into different communities. Fdp is a recently proposed density-based clustering algorithm which does not need the number of clusters as prior input and the result is insensitive to its parameter. However, Fdp cannot be directly applied to community detection due to its inability to recognize the community centers in the network. To solve the problem, a new community detection method (named IsoFdp) is proposed in this paper. First, we use Isomap technique to map the network data into a low dimensional manifold which can reveal diverse pair-wised similarity. Then Fdp is applied to detect the communities in networks. An improved partition density function is proposed to select the proper number of communities automatically. We test our method on both synthetic and real-world networks, and the results demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithm over the state-of-the-art methods.