Community Detection in Social Networks Using Affinity Propagation with Adaptive Similarity Matrix

Community detection problem is a projection of data clustering where the network's topological properties are only considered for measuring similarities among nodes. Also, finding communities' kernel nodes and expanding a community from kernel will certainly help us to find optimal communities. Among the existing community detection approaches, the affinity propagation (AP)-based method has been showing promising results and does not require any predefined information such as the number of clusters (communities). AP is an exemplar-based clustering method that defines the negative real-valued similarity measure sim(i, k) between data point i and exemplar k as the probability of k being the exemplar of data point i. According to our intuition, the value of sim(i, k) should not be identical to sim(k, i). In this study, a new version of AP using an adaptive similarity matrix, namely affinity propagation with adaptive similarity (APAS) matrix, is proposed, which could efficiently show the leadership probabilities between data points. APAS can adaptively transform the symmetric similarity matrix into an asymmetric one. It outperforms AP method in terms of accuracy. Extensive experiments conducted on artificial and real-world networks demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.