A Method of Node Layout of a Complex Network Based on Community Compression

Abstract

As the theory of complex networks is further studied, the scale of nodes in the network is increasing, which makes it difficult to find useful patterns from only the analysis of nodes. Therefore, this paper proposes a complex network node layout method based on community compression, which can effectively display the mesoscale structure characteristics of the network, making it more convenient for users to analyze the status and function of a single node or a class of nodes in the whole complex network. To begin with, the whole network is divided into communities with different granularity by the Louvain algorithm. Secondly, the method of nodes importance analysis based on topological potential theory is extended from the network to the community structure, and the internal nodes of the community are classified into three types, namely important nodes, relatively important nodes, and fringe nodes. Furthermore, a compression algorithm for the community structure is designed to realize the compression of the network by retaining important nodes and merging fringe nodes. Finally, the compression network is laid out by the traditional force-directed layout method. Experimental results show that, compared with the compression layout methods of a complex network based on degree or PageRank, the method in this paper can retain the integrated community composition and its internal structure, which is convenient for users to effectively analyze the topology structure of a complex network.