A stable community detection approach for complex network based on density peak clustering and label propagation

Dividing a network into communities has great benefits in understanding the characteristics of the network. The label propagation algorithm (LPA) is a fast and convenient community detection algorithm. However, the community initialization of LPA does not take advantage of topological information of networks, and its robustness is poor. In this paper, we propose a stable community detection algorithm based on density peak clustering and label propagation (DS-LPA). First, the local density calculation method in density peak clustering algorithm is improved in finding the community center of the network, so as to build a suitable initial community, which can improve the quality of community partition. Then, the label update order is determined reasonably by computing the information transmission power of nodes, and the solutions for multiple candidate labels are provided, which greatly improved the robustness of the algorithm. DS-LPA is compared with other seven algorithms on the synthetic network and real-world networks. NMI, ARI, and modularity are used to evaluate these algorithms. It can be concluded that DS-LPA has a higher performance than most comparison algorithms on synthetic network with ten different mixed parameters by statistical testing. And DS-LPA can quickly calculate the best community partition on different sizes of real-world networks.