A Multi-Layer Random Walk Method for Local Dynamic Community Detection in Brain Functional Network

Abstract

Detecting the time-varying community structure of brain functional network is very important to reveal dynamic properties of the human brain. Although several community detection methods have been proposed, they are limited in real application due to their poor performance in large dynamic network and difficulty in parameter setting without prior knowledge. To address these problems, this paper proposes a novel dynamic community detection method for the brain network based on random walk, named as ML-RW. This method uses local community discovery instead of global community detection to improve its ability to deal with large dynamic networks. Specifically, ML-RW first selects a query brain region and sends out multiple random walkers starting from this region to explore local community structures of all networks in dynamic network simultaneously. It updates the visiting probability vector of each walker by aggregating the transition probabilities from itself and two temporally adjacent networks. Since the influence strength from one network to another is adaptively tuned according to the relevance of visiting histories of two networks, ML-RW could guarantee the temporal smoothness of the detected modular structure without introducing the hyper-parameter and thus avoids the problem of parameter setting in existing methods. Experiments on two public real neuroimaging datasets demonstrate that our proposed method has more potential to capture subtle community variations in the brain region, stronger ability to discover biomarkers for brain diseases, and higher test-retest reliability than the conventional method.