A thermal flux-diffusing model for complex networks and its applications in community structure detection

Abstract

We introduce a thermal flux-diffusing model for complex networks. Based on this model, we propose a physical method to detect the communities in the complex networks. The method allows us to obtain the temperature distribution of nodes in time that scales linearly with the network size. Then, the local community enclosing a given node can be easily detected for the reason that the dense connections in the local communities lead to the temperatures of nodes in the same community being close to each other. The community structure of a network can be recursively detected by randomly choosing the nodes outside the detected local communities. In the experiments, we apply our method to a set of benchmarking networks with known pre-determined community structures. The experiment results show that our method has higher accuracy and precision than most existing globe methods and is better than the other existing local methods in the selection of the initial node. Finally, several real-world networks are investigated.