A local community detection algorithm based on internal force between nodes

Community structure is an important characteristic of complex networks. Uncovering communities in complex networks is currently a hot research topic in the field of network analysis. Local community detection algorithms based on seed-extension are widely used for addressing this problem because they excel in efficiency and effectiveness. Compared with global community detection methods, local methods can uncover communities without the integral structural information of complex networks. However, they still have quality and stability deficiencies in overlapping community detection. For this reason, a local community detection algorithm based on internal force between nodes is proposed. First, local degree central nodes and Jaccard coefficient are used to detect core members of communities as seeds in the network, thus guaranteeing that the selected seeds are central nodes of communities. Second, the node with maximum degree among seeds is pre-extended by the fitness function every time. Finally, the top k nodes with the best performance in pre-extension process are extended by the fitness function with internal force between nodes to obtain high-quality communities in the network. Experimental results on both real and artificial networks show that the proposed algorithm can uncover communities more accurately than all the comparison algorithms.