Density shrinking algorithm for community detection with path based similarity

Community structure is ubiquitous in real world complex networks. Finding the communities is the key to understand the functions of those networks. A lot of works have been done in designing algorithms for community detection, but it remains a challenge in the field. Traditional modularity optimization suffers from the resolution limit problem. Recent researches show that combining the density based technique with the modularity optimization can overcome the resolution limit and an efficient algorithm named DenShrink was provided. The main procedure of DenShrink is repeatedly finding and merging micro-communities (broad sense) into super nodes until they cannot merge. Analyses in this paper show that if the procedure is replaced by finding and merging only dense pairs, both of the detection accuracy and runtime can be obviously improved. Thus an improved density-based algorithm: ImDS is provided. Since the time complexity, path based similarity indexes are difficult to be applied in community detection for high performance. In this paper, the path based Katz index is simplified and used in the ImDS algorithm.