A Fast Overlapping Community Detection Algorithm Based on Weak Cliques for Large-Scale Networks

Abstract

Community detection is an important tool to analyze hidden information such as functional module and topology structure in complex networks. Compared with traditional community detection, it is more challenging to find overlapping communities in complex networks, especially when the networks are of large scales. Among various overlapping community detection techniques, the well-known clique percolation method (CPM) has shown promising performance in terms of quality of found communities, but suffers from serious curse of dimensionality due to its high computational complexity, which makes it very unlikely to be applied to large-scale networks. To address this issue, in this paper, we propose a weak-CPM for overlapping community detection in large-scale networks. A new measure for characterizing the similarity between weak cliques is also suggested to check whether the weak cliques can be merged into a community. Experimental results on synthetic and real-world networks demonstrate the competitive performance of the proposed method over six popular overlapping community detection algorithms in terms of both computational efficiency and quality of found communities. In addition, the proposed method is also suitable for detecting large-scale networks with an unclear community structure under different levels of overlapping density and overlapping diversity, which is an important property of many real-world complex networks.