Community Detection by Motif-Aware Label Propagation

Community detection (or graph clustering) is crucial for unraveling the structural properties of complex networks. As an important technique in community detection, label propagation has shown the advantage of finding a good community structure with nearly linear time complexity. However, despite the progress that has been made, there are still several important issues that have not been properly addressed. First, the label propagation typically proceeds over the lower order structure of the network and only the direct one-hop connections between nodes are taken into consideration. Unfortunately, the higher order structure that may encode design principle of the network and be crucial for community detection is neglected under this regime. Second, the stability of the identified community structure may also be seriously affected by the inherent randomness in the label propagation process. To tackle the above issues, this article proposes a Motif-Aware Weighted Label Propagation method for community detection. We focus on triangles within the network, but our technique extends to other kinds of motifs as well. Specifically, the motif-based higher order structure mining is conducted to capture structural characteristics of the network. First, the motif of interest (locally meaningful pattern) is identified, and then, the motif-based hypergraph can be constructed to encode the higher order connections. To further utilize the structural information of the network, a re-weighted network is designed, which unifies both the higher order structure and the original lower order structure. Accordingly, a novel voting strategy termed NaS (considering both Number and Strength of connections) is proposed to update node labels during the label propagation process. In this way, the random label selection can be effectively eliminated, yielding more stable community structures. Experimental results on multiple real-world datasets have shown the superiority of the proposed method.