Community detection by influential nodes based on random walk distance

Abstract

SummaryCommunity detection is a key feature that can be used to extract useful information from networks. In most studies, the same static algorithms are used on real‐time snapshots of the dynamic network. Such an action increases the calculations and the time taken for the clustering operation. The idea of community detection is based on the fact that communities are formed around a node that is more popular and influential. Therefore, in the proposed algorithm, first, several snapshots are received from the network, then for the first snapshot, the influence of each node is calculated using the influence function based on the random walk distance between nodes. Then by selecting k nodes with higher influence, network communities are formed and other nodes belong to the community with the most common edges. In the next step, the next snapshots will be received and then the communities will be updated. Then K nodes with higher influence are selected and their community is created if needed. The proposed method has been compared with state‐of‐the‐art algorithms, and the results show that proposed method has been able to have a suitable performance in the uniformity of communities and also the speed of community formation.