Reveal Community Structure by Local Similarity and Hierarchical Clustering

Community structure is one of the most important topological properties of complex networks, which can help us to understand the functions and guide the development of networks. In this article, a community detection algorithm is proposed based on local similarity and hierarchical clustering. Local similarity is used to measure link similarities instead of node similarities in order to form a similarity metric. Hierarchical clustering is used to gather all the links to form a hierarchical tree, and then cut the tree with the optimization value of modularity to get the community structure. Experiments on real-world and generated benchmark networks show the significant performance of the algorithm both in accuracy and efficiency.