SCAN: a structural clustering algorithm for networks

Network clustering (or graph partitioning) is an important task for the discovery of underlying structures in networks. Many algorithms find clusters by maximizing the number of intra-cluster edges. While such algorithms find useful and interesting structures, they tend to fail to identify and isolate two kinds of vertices that play special roles - vertices that bridge clusters (hubs) and vertices that are marginally connected to clusters (outliers). Identifying hubs is useful for applications such as viral marketing and epidemiology since hubs are responsible for spreading ideas or disease. In contrast, outliers have little or no influence, and may be isolated as noise in the data. In this paper, we proposed a novel algorithm called SCAN (Structural Clustering Algorithm for Networks), which detects clusters, hubs and outliers in networks. It clusters vertices based on a structural similarity measure. The algorithm is fast and efficient, visiting each vertex only once. An empirical evaluation of the method using both synthetic and real datasets demonstrates superior performance over other methods such as the modularity-based algorithms.