Research Article A Node Influence Based Label Propagation Algorithm for Community Detection in Networks

Copyright © 2014 Yan Xing et al.This is an open access article distributed under the Creative CommonsAttribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Label propagation algorithm (LPA) is an extremely fast community detection method and is widely used in large scale networks. In spite of the advantages of LPA, the issue of its poor stability has not yet been well addressed. We propose a novel node influence based label propagation algorithm for community detection (NIBLPA), which improves the performance of LPA by improving the node orders of label updating and the mechanism of label choosing when more than one label is contained by the maximum number of nodes. NIBLPA can get more stable results than LPA since it avoids the complete randomness of LPA.The experimental results on both synthetic and real networks demonstrate that NIBLPA maintains the efficiency of the traditional LPA algorithm, and, at the same time, it has a superior performance to some representative methods. 1