LabelRankT: Incremental Community Detection in Dynamic Networks via Label Propagation

An increasingly important challenge in network analysis is efficient detection and tracking of communities in dynamic networks for which changes arrive as a stream. There is a need for algorithms that can incrementally update and monitor communities whose evolution generates huge realtime data streams, such as the Internet or on-line social networks. In this paper, we propose LabelRankT, an online distributed algorithm for detection of communities in large-scale dynamic networks through stabilized label propagation. Results of tests on real-world networks demonstrate that LabelRankT has much lower computational costs than other algorithms. It also improves the quality of the detected communities compared to dynamic detection methods and matches the quality achieved by static detection approaches. Unlike most of other algorithms which apply only to binary networks, LabelRankT works on weighted and directed networks, which provides a flexible and promising solution for real-world applications.