FlowPro: A flow propagation method for single community detection

In this paper, we propose a flow propagation algorithm (FlowPro) that finds the community of a node in a complex network. The novelty of the proposed approach is the fact that FlowPro is local and it does not require the knowledge of the entire graph as most of the existing methods from literature. This makes possible the application of FlowPro in extremely large graphs or in cases where the entire graph is unknown like in most social networks. In addition, it simply compute the community of exactly one node, that is the major issue in most social network based applications. Experimental results and comparisons with other methods from the literature are presented for a variety of benchmark graphs with known community structure, derived by varying a number of graph parameters and real dataset graphs.