A new community detection method for simplified networks by combining structure and attribute information

Complex networks have a large number of nodes and edges, which prevents the understanding of network structure and the discovery of valid information. This paper proposes a new community detection method for simplified networks. First, a similarity measure is defined, the path and attribute information can reflect the potential relationship between nodes that are not directly connected. Based on the defined similarity, an Importance Score(IS) is constructed to show the importance of each node, it reflects the density around each node. Then, the simplification processes can be realized on complex networks. On the simplified network, this paper proposes a novel community detection method, in which the community structure of the simplified network is detected. The experiments were conducted on real networks and compared with several widely used methods. The experimental results illustrate that the proposed method is more advantageous and can visually and effectively uncover the community structure.