Using Prior Knowledge for Community Detection by Label Propagation Algorithm

Community detection is an important approach to analyze and understand the organization or unit structure of the complex networks. By comparing the existing community detection algorithms, the label propagation algorithm (LPA) shows prominent operation speed and qualifies near linear time complexity. However, original LPA algorithm only uses the topological structure to guide the community detection process, failing to improve the quality of community detection when extra information offered. In this paper, we combine the prior information with topological structure to guide the community detection process. During the label propagation process, we proposed a new label update principle, making a node absorb its neighbor label information depending on the label distribution. The experimental results both on real networks and artificial networks show that the improved algorithm not only inherits the characteristic of rapid speed, but also improves the quality of community detection. Moreover, the improved algorithm still has the feature of near linear time complexity.

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