Abstract:

Community structure can provide a mediumscale analysis perspective for other analysis in the networks, and its research is fundamental and important in complex networks. In complex networks, the overlapping community structure is a more actual description of the structure of social networks. So analyzing the structure of overlapping communities has practical significance. After studying the existing overlapping community detection algorithms combined with certain knowledge of information theory, we define the concept of community from the perspective of information theory, and present an algorithm which can detect the overlapping community structure in complex networks on the basis of information dissemination theory. Experiments show that compared with the traditional definition of community and detection algorithms, the proposed algorithm has a more accurate physical meaning and a lower time complexity.

Key words: overlapping community detection;definition of community;information theory;information dissemination