Discovering Communities in Linear Time: a Physics Approach

Fang Wu and Bernardo A. Huberman

HP Laboratories
Palo Alto, CA 94304

Abstract

We present a method that allows for the discovery of
communities within graphs of arbitrary size in times that scale
linearly with their size. This method avoids edge cutting and is
based on notions of voltage drops across networks that are both intuitive and easy to solve regardless of the complexity of the graph involved. We additionally show how this algorithm allows for the swift discovery of the community surrounding a given node without having to extract all the communities out of a graph

Full paper: linear.pdf