A Parallel Community Structure Mining Method in Big Social Networks

Abstract

Community structure plays a key role in analyzing network features and helping people to dig out valuable hidden information. However, how to discover the hidden community structures is one of the biggest challenges in social network analysis, especially when the network size swells to a high level. Infomap is a top-class algorithm in nonoverlapping community structure detection. However, it is designed for single processor. When tackling large networks, its limited scalability makes it less effective in fully utilizing server resources. In this paper, based on infomap, we develop a scalable parallel nonoverlapping community detection method, Pinfomr (parallel Infomap with MapReduce), which utilizes the MapReduce framework to solve the two problems. Experiments on artificial networks and real datasets show that our parallel method has satisfying performance and scalability.