Affiliations: Department of Computer Science, Jamia Millia Islamia, Jamia Nagar, New Delhi, India
Correspondence:
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Corresponding author: Muhammad Abulaish, Department of Computer Science, Jamia Millia Islamia (A Central University), Jamia Nagar, New Delhi-25, India. E-mail:abulaish@ieee.org
Abstract: Community detection is an important task for identifying the structure and function of complex networks. The task is challenging as communities often show overlapping and hierarchical behavior, i.e., a node can belong to multiple communities, and multiple smaller communities can be embedded within a larger community. Moreover, real-world networks often contain communities of arbitrary size and shape, along with outliers. This paper presents a novel density-based overlapping community detection method, OCMiner, to identify overlapping community structures in social networks. Unlike other density-based community detection methods, OCMiner does not require the neighborhood threshold parameter (ε) to be set by the users. Determining an optimal value for ε is a longstanding and challenging task for density-based clustering methods. Instead, OCMiner automatically determines the neighborhood threshold parameter for each node locally from the underlying network. It also uses a novel distance function which utilizes the weights of the edges in weighted networks, besides being able to find communities in un-weighted networks. The efficacy of the proposed method has been established through experiments on various real-world and synthetic networks. In comparison to the existing state-of-the-art community detection methods, OCMiner is computationally faster, scalable to large-scale networks, and able to find significant community structures in social networks.
Keywords: Social network analysis, community detection, overlapping community detection, density-based clustering
