A seed-expanding method based on random walks for community detection in networks with ambiguous community structures

Community detection has received a great deal of attention, since it could help to reveal the useful information hidden in complex networks. Although most previous modularity-based and local modularity-based community detection algorithms could detect strong communities, they may fail to exactly detect several weak communities. In this work, we define a network with clear or ambiguous community structures based on the types of its communities. A seed-expanding method based on random walks is proposed to detect communities for networks, especially for the networks with ambiguous community structures. We identify local maximum degree nodes, and detect seed communities in a network. Then, the probability of a node belonging to each community is calculated based on the total probability model and random walks, and each community is expanded by repeatedly adding the node which is most likely to belong to it. Finally, we use the community optimization method to ensure that each node is in a community. Experimental results on both computer-generated and real-world networks demonstrate that the quality of the communities detected by the proposed algorithm is superior to the- state-of-the-art algorithms in the networks with ambiguous community structures.