Controlled consensus time for community detection in complex networks

Networks are powerful representations for many complex systems, where nodes represent elements of the system and edges represent connections between them. Consensus problems in coupled agents have already been studied in complex networks. This paper explores the use of the consensus time in the presence of a leader as distance measure on complex networks. In this case, the distance between two nodes in the network is characterized by the time that one of them takes to reach a stationary state with the other node being pinned. A new technique for community detection of complex networks has been developed based on the proposed distance measure. The method has been tested with various networks and promising results have been obtained.