Enhancing betweenness algorithm for detecting communities in complex networks

Abstract

Community structure is an important topological property common to many social, biological and technological networks. First, by using the concept of the structural weight, we introduced an improved version of the betweenness algorithm of Girvan and Newman to detect communities in networks without (intrinsic) edge weight and then extended it to networks with (intrinsic) edge weight. The improved algorithm was tested on both artificial and real-world networks, and the results show that it can more effectively detect communities in networks both with and without (intrinsic) edge weight. Moreover, the technique for improving the betweenness algorithm in the paper may be directly applied to other community detection algorithms.