A local community detection algorithm based on potential community exploration

Local community detection aims to detect local communities that have expanded from the given node. Because of the convenience of obtaining the local information of the network and nearly linear time complexity, researchers have proposed many local community detection algorithms to discover the community structure of real-world networks and have obtained excellent results. Most existing local community detection algorithms expand from the given node to a community based on an expansion mechanism that can determine the membership of nodes. However, when determining the membership of neighboring nodes of a community, previous algorithms only considered the impact from the current community, but the impact from the potential communities around the node was neglected. As the name implies, a potential community is a community structure hidden in an unexplored network around a node. This paper gives the definition of potential communities of a node for the first time, that is, a series of connected components consisting of the node's neighbors that are in the unexplored network. We propose a three-stage local expansion algorithm, named LCDPC, that performs Local Community Detection based on Potential Community exploration. First, we search for a suitable node to replace the given node as the seed by calculating the node importance and the node similarity. Second, we form the initial community by combining the seed and its suitable potential community. Finally, the eligible nodes are selected by comparing the similarities between potential communities and the expanding community and nodes and adding them to the initial community for community expansion. The proposed algorithm is compared with eight state-of-the-art algorithms on both real-world networks and artificial networks, and the experimental results show that the performance of the proposed algorithm is better than that of the comparison algorithms and that the application of potential community exploration can help identify the community structure of networks.