A Community Structure Enhancement-Based Community Detection Algorithm for Complex Networks

Community detection has been recognized as one of the most important tools to discover useful information hidden in complex networks which is usually hard to be obtained by simple observations. Existing community detection algorithms have demonstrated their effectiveness on a variety of complex networks, most of them, however, suffer from the scalability issue on complex networks without a clear community structure due to the challenge in the detection of ambiguous community structure. To address this issue, in this paper, we propose a community structure enhancement method, termed CSE, for community detection in complex networks. In the proposed CSE, the community structure of a network is enhanced by adding links between the nodes possibly belonging to the same community and reducing links between those belonging to different communities, thereby converting an ambiguous community structure into a structure much clearer than the original one. The experimental results show the superior performance of the proposed CSE over five state-of-the-art community detection algorithms on both synthetic benchmark networks and real-world networks, especially for those without a clear community structure.