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Community detection by graph Voronoi diagrams

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Community detection by graph Voronoi diagrams
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49
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CC Attribution 3.0 Unported:
You are free to use, adapt and copy, distribute and transmit the work or content in adapted or unchanged form for any legal purpose as long as the work is attributed to the author in the manner specified by the author or licensor.
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Accurate and efficient community detection in networks is a key challenge for complex network theory and its applications. The problem is analogous to cluster analysis in data mining, a field rich in metric space-based methods. Common to these methods is a geometric, distance-based definition of clusters or communities. Here we propose a new geometric approach to graph community detection based on graph Voronoi diagrams. Our method serves as proof of principle that the definition of appropriate distance metrics on graphs can bring a rich set of metric space-based clustering methods to network science. We employ a simple edge metric that reflects the intra- or inter-community character of edges, and a graph density-based rule to identify seed nodes of Voronoi cells. Our algorithm outperforms most network community detection methods applicable to large networks on benchmark as well as real-world networks. In addition to offering a computationally efficient alternative for community detection, our method opens new avenues for adapting a wide range of data mining algorithms to complex networks from the class of centroid- and density-based clustering methods.