LPX: Overlapping community detection based on X-means and label propagation algorithm in attributed networks

Traditional community detection methods in attributed networks (eg, social network) usually disregard abundant node attribute information and only focus on structural information of a graph. Existing community detection methods in attributed networks are mostly applied in the detection of nonoverlapping communities and cannot be directly used to detect the overlapping structures. This article proposes an overlapping community detection algorithm in attributed networks. First, we employ the modified X-means algorithm to cluster attributes to form different themes. Second, we employ the label propagation algorithm (LPA), which is based on neighborhood network conductance for priority and the rule of theme weight, to detect communities in each theme. Finally, we perform redundant processing to form the final community division. The proposed algorithm improves the X-means algorithm to avoid the effects of outliers. Problems of LPA such as instability of division and adjacent communities being easily merged can be corrected by prioritizing the node neighborhood network conductance. As the community is detected in the attribute subspace, the algorithm can find overlapping communities. Experimental results on real-attributed and synthetic-attributed networks show that the performance of the proposed algorithm is excellent with multiple evaluation metrics.