Overlapping community detection based on the union of all maximum spanning trees

Abstract

Purpose The state-of-the-art methods designed for overlapping community detection are limited by their high execution time as in CPM or the need to provide some parameters like the number of communities in Bigclam and Nise_sph, which is a nontrivial information. Hence, there is a need to develop the accuracy that represents the primordial goal, where the actual state-of-the-art methods do not succeed to achieve high correspondence with the ground truth for many instances of networks. The paper aims to discuss this issue. Design/methodology/approach The authors offer a new method that explore the union of all maximum spanning trees (UMST) and models the strength of links between nodes. Also, each node in the UMST is linked with its most similar neighbor. From this model, the authors extract local community for each node, and then they combine the produced communities according to their number of shared nodes. Findings The experiments on eight real-world data sets and four sets of artificial networks show that the proposed method achieves obvious improvements over four state-of-the-art (BigClam, OSLOM, Demon, SE, DMST and ST) methods in terms of the F-score and ONMI for the networks with ground truth (Amazon, Youtube, LiveJournal and Orkut). Also, for the other networks, it provides communities with a good overlapping modularity. Originality/value In this paper, the authors investigate the UMST for the overlapping community detection.