This article has been accepted for publication in a future issue of this journal, but has not been

fully edited. Content may change prior to final publication. Citation information: DOI
10.1109/ACCESS.2020.3041472, IEEE Access

Date of publication xxxx 00, 0000, date of current v ersion xxxx 00, 0000.

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/ACCESS.2017.DOI Number

Overlapping Community Detection Method

Based on Network Representation Learning
and Density Peaks
HONGTAO LIU1 AND GEGE LI 2
Chongqing University of P osts and Telecommunications, Chongqing 400000, China

Corresponding author: GEGE LI2 (e-mail: S180201032@ stu.cqupt.edu.cn).

T his work was supported in part by the National Social Science Fund of China 18BGL266 and 20BSH076.

ABSTRACT At present, the research on complex social networks has attracted extensive attention from
scholars, and community detection is an important research direction in the study of network structure.
Network data is often high-dimensional and very large, which makes it very difficult to process. Therefore,
it is of great significance for community detection to represent network structure with low-dimensional vector.
And many real world social networks contain overlapping communities . In this paper, we propose an
overlapping community detection method based on network representation learning and density peaks, called
NRLDP. First, it uses network representation learning technology to represent the unweighted network or
weighted network with low-dimensional vectors. Then, it applies the density peaks clustering algorithm to
overlapping community detection, uses cosine similarity to calculate the distance between nodes, and
improves the local density calculation method. Finally, it selects the core node according to the relative
distance and local density, and allocates the remaining nodes to achieve overlapping community detection of
unweighted network or weighted network. Compared with relevant community detection methods on real
world social networks and synthetic networks of LFR Benchmark, the results of the experiment show that
our proposed approach is effective and accurate.

INDEX TERMS Network representation learning, density peaks, overlapping community detection

I. INTRODUCTION homogeneity, such as Individuals in groups with the same

In the late 1990s, Duncan J. Watts and Steven H. Strogatz a et
al. published "Collective dynamics of ‘small world’ networks"
in "Nature" [1], followed by A.L. Barabasi et al. in "Science"
Published "Emergence of Scaling in Random Networks" [2].
The advent of these two articles represents the birth of small-
world networks and scale-free networks that are closer to the
real world, opening a new era of complex network research.
The social network is essentially a special complex network.
The nodes in the network represent individual users or certain
groups, and the edges represent the intricate relationships
between nodes through interaction. Mining useful information
in the network is very important for scientific research and
application. Early researchers proposed that it is more
meaningful to discover hidden laws in the network by studying
social groups than simply studying individual users.
esearchers used community detection algorithms to find a
homogenous community structure in complex social networks
[3]. Individuals and individuals in a social group often have
interests have a high probability of becoming friends. In
addition, many complex social networks will exhibit a strong
social effect. The manifestation of this social effect is the
formation of a variety of but closely connected groups, and the
contacts between individuals within the group are relatively
frequent. And there is much less contact with other individuals
outside the group. If an individual is divided into multiple
groups, it is an overlapping community detection, and these
individuals are overlapping nodes. In real networks, there are
often overlapping nodes. Therefore, overlapping community
detection has important research significance.
With the development of social networks, network data is
often high-dimensional, very large and complex, making it
very difficult to process. Traditional community detection
methods mainly obtain community information in the network
based on the representation of the adjacency matrix, but the
adjacency matrix can only represent the direct connection
information between nodes, which often has the problem of

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10.1109/ACCESS.2020.3041472, IEEE Access
H. Liu, G. Li: Ov erlapping Community Detection Method Based on Network Representation Learning and Density Peaks

unique disasters and excessive complexity. And Network
Representation Learning (NRL) can represent the information
in the network with low-dimensional vectors, which not only
expresses the network structure information, but also reduces
the computational complexity.
In this paper, we propose an overlapping community
detection method (NRLDP) based on network representation
learning and density peaks, which not only considers the
problem of network data representation, but also considers the
problem of irregular community structure in the actual
network.
The rest of this paper is arranged as follows: Section II
summarizes the related work of the algorithm, and Section III
describes the detailed process of the proposed NRLDP
algorithm. Section IV introduces the experimental results of
the NRLDP algorithm obtained on the synthetic network and
the real network data set, and compared with other algorithms.
Conclusions and suggestions for future work are presented in
Section V.
II. RELATED WORK
A. CLASSICAL OVERLAPPING COMMUNITY
DETECTION METHODS
Classical overlapping community detection methods can be
roughly divided into the following categories: clique
percolation based methods, graph partitioning based methods,
local expansion and optimization based methods, and label
propagation based methods.
In 2005, Palla et al. proposed Clique percolation Method
(CPM) algorithm [4] to detect overlapping communities. The
main idea is to detect overlapping communities based on k-
max groups. The k-maximal clique represents a fully
connected subgraph with k nodes in the network. If a k-
maximum clique overlaps with another k-maximum clique by
k-1 nodes, then these two k-maximum cliques are called
adjacent k extremely large group. The adjacent k-max group
is the overlapping community structure detected by the CPM
algorithm. In 2009, Shen et al. proposed the EAGLE
algorithm [5], which combines the ideas of hierarchical
clustering and extremely large cliques . A modularity function
EQ is proposed to evaluate the detection quality of
overlapping communities. It not only considers the structure
of overlapping communities in the network, but also considers
the hierarchical structure between communities. In addition,
Farkas et al. [6] extended the CPM algorithm to a weighted
network and proposed the CPMw algorithm, but the algorithm
stipulates that only k- factions whose internal density exceeds
a given threshold can become a community, which has certain
limitations. There are two main methods based on graph
partitioning. One method for graph partitioning is to use non -
negative matrix factorization. Zhang et al. [7] first used the
NMF model in overlapping community detection, but it needs
to reflect the number of communities. Subsequently, many
scholars have proposed some improved methods, such as
SNMF [8]. In addition, NMFOSC [9] solves this problem
through feature matrix preprocessing and ranking
optimization, thereby discovering the network structure of the
unknown number of communities. In 2018, Li et al. [10]
proposed an overlapping community detection algorithm
based on semi-supervised matrix factorization and random
walk. Another method is spectral clustering, which is mainly
based on the feature vector of the adjacency matrix on the way
to the network to perform graph segmentation. Some research
scholars prioritize local information [11], [12], but its
optimization is carried out in the entire feature space. Research
scholars also consider the local structure of the network. The
local expansion algorithm [13] is mainly based on the idea of
community growth. The community seed is locally expanded
and optimized through a custom local expansion function until
it becomes a community with the greatest benefit. Resulting in
a community structure. Lanchinicetti et al. [14] proposed the
LFM algorithm, which randomly selects a node as the initial
seed, and then expands from the seed node to build a
community until the fitness function reaches the local
optimum. Liu et al. [15], a locally optimal extended
hierarchical clustering algorithm is proposed. Yu et al. [16]
proposed SEOCO, a seed expansion overlap community
detection algorithm based on random walk. Bhatia [17]
proposed a hierarchical method based on autoencoder to
initialize candidate seed nodes, and determine the number of
communities by considering the network structure. The
disadvantage of these methods is that the quality of the
division result depends on the selection of seeds, which leads
to unstable division results. The method based on label
propagation is also a method considering the local structure of
the network. The idea is to initialize a label for each node in
the network, and then update the label according to the
conditions of these nodes until the node no longer changes.
COPRA [18] and SLPA [19] is a relatively classic algorithm.
Both are improvements to the LPA [20] algorithm to realize
the detection of overlapping communities. The COPRA
algorithm is based on multiple labels, and is the first fuzzy
overlapping community detection algorithm based on label
propagation. This algorithm assigns a label series to each node,
and uses the parameter v to control the length of the label
series, that is, the maximum number of labels that each node
can contain, and the maximum number of communities that a
node can belong to. The SLPA is an information label
propagation algorithm based on spermer-listenter, which
propagates labels between nodes according to the rules of
acceptance interaction. The method based on tag propagation
has the advantages of simplicity and efficiency, but the
community structure of its detection has great uncertainty.
In 2014, Rodriguez et al. [21] proposed a density peak
clustering algorithm. Compared with other clustering
algorithms, this algorithm can cluster non-spherical data sets
well. In real complex networks, the relationships between
nodes are often intricate and the community structure in the
network is irregular. Therefore, the improved density peak
algorithm used in community detection can effectively divide

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H. Liu, G. Li: Ov erlapping Community Detection Method Based on Network Representation Learning and Density Peaks
the irregular community structure. Deng et al. [22] improves
the density peak algorithm for community detection. This
method uses Jaccard similarity and shortest path to obtain
composite similarity, and obtains the distance based on the
node similarity value as the input of the algorithm, but the
algorithm cannot detect overlapping communities.
B. NETWORK REPRESENTATION LEARNING
The main task of network representation learning is to
represent the structural features of any node in the network
with low-dimensional vectors for better data mining. Recently
in the field of natural language processing, research on word
embedding has provided new ideas for the feature
representation of network nodes. Perozzi et al. introduced
word embedding related technologies into network
representation learning, and proposed the Deepwalk [23]. This
result has triggered a wave of research on network
representation learning.
Deepwalk combines two models in different fields. One is
random walk, which is used to generate a large number of
sequences composed of nodes in network representation
learning, which is equivalent to sentences in the corpus of
natural language processing. The other is the Skipgram model
proposed by Mikolov et al. in word2vec, which takes the
obtained node sequence as input to learn and train the vector
representation of the nodes in the network. The process frame
diagram of Deepwalk is shown in Figure 1.
FIGURE 1. The framework diagram of Deepwalk.
C. DENSITY PEAKS CLUSTERING
Density Peak Clustering (DPC) is a density-based clustering
algorithm proposed by Rodriguez et al. in Science [21].
According to the characteristics of the data distribution, DPC
assumes that the cluster center points have a large local density,
and the relative distance between different cluster centers is
relatively large. And then according to the obtained center
points, it allocates the remaining sample points to the cluster
to which a certain center point with a closer distance and
greater local density belongs. The algorithm includes the
following processes.
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First, DPC algorithm define the local density 𝜌𝑖 of node 𝑖,
as Equation (1) and (2):
𝜌𝑖 = ∑𝑗 𝜒 (𝑑 𝑖𝑗 − 𝑑 𝑐 ) (1)
1 𝑥<0
𝜒 (𝓍) = { (2)
0 𝑜𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑟𝑤𝑖𝑠𝑒
where, 𝜌𝑖 is the local density of node 𝑖, 𝑑𝑖𝑗 is the distance
between node 𝑖 and node 𝑗, and 𝑑 𝑐 is the cutoff distance.
Second, the relative distance 𝛿𝑖 of the node 𝑖 is defined as
Equation (3):
max ( 𝑑𝑖𝑗 ) 𝜌𝑖 = max ( 𝜌𝑘 )
𝑗 𝑘
𝛿𝑖 = { (3)
min (𝑑𝑖𝑗 ) 𝑜𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑟𝑤𝑖𝑠𝑒
𝑗:𝜌𝑗>𝜌𝑖
Then, the point with relatively large 𝜌𝑖 and 𝛿𝑖 is selected as
the cluster center. Finally, it assigns the remaining sample
points to the clusters with the closest distance and localdensity
greater than the current center point.
III. NRLDP ALGORITHM
This section details the framework of the proposed algorithm
NRLDP. The method mainly includes four steps: First, we use
Deepwalk to represent the structural information of each node
in the network with a low-dimensional and continuous vector,
and calculates the distance between nodes by obtaining the
similarity between nodes according to the vector
representation of the nodes; Second, we use the degree of the
node and the Local Clustering Coefficient (LCC) [24] to
measure the local density of each node, and calculates the
relative distance of each node; Then, we choose the point with
higher local density and relatively far distance as the core point
of the community; Finally, we allocate the remaining nodes
according to the degree of belonging of the remaining nodes
to detect overlapping communities. The flow chart of NRLDP
algorithm is shown in Figure 2.
A. RELATIVE DISTANCE CALCULATION
The relationship between nodes in a complex social network
is often represented by an adjacency matrix. The adjacency
matrix of an unweighted network has an element of 0 or 1. 0
means that there is no connection between nod es in the
network, and 1 means that the nodes are directly connected.
The connected nodes in the weighted network are represented
by weights. In a real world social network, the direct
connection between most individuals and other individuals in
the network is very limited, so only a small amount of inter-
node connection information can be obtained, and the
relationship between nodes cannot be well represented. In
order to solve this problem, this paper uses the Deepwalk
algorithm to preprocess complex social network data, and each
 This article has been accepted for publication in a future issue of this journal, but has not been fully edited. Content may change prior to final publication. Citation information: DOI
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H. Liu, G. Li: Ov erlapping Community Detection Method Based on Network Representation Learning and Density Peaks
FIGURE 2. The flow chart of NRLDP algorithm.
node is represented by a low-dimensional vector. The node
vector represents the structural information of the node in the
network. Therefore, in the vector space, the greater the vector
similarity of the node, the closer the distance, on the contrary,
the smaller the similarity, the farther the distance.
Usually a network with n nodes can be regarded as a graph
𝐺 = (𝑉, 𝐸), where 𝑉 = {𝑣1 , 𝑣2 , … , 𝑣𝑛 } is a node set and 𝐸 =
{𝑒1 , 𝑒2 , … , 𝑒𝑚 } is an edge set. The node vector representation
set obtained by using network representation learning is 𝑋 =
{𝑥 𝑣1 , 𝑥 𝑣2, … , 𝑥 𝑣𝑛}, which can represent either unweighted
network nodes or weighted network nodes.
According to the vector representation of nodes 𝑖 and 𝑗,the
cosine similarity is used to calculate the similarity 𝑆(𝑖, 𝑗)
between nodes 𝑖 and 𝑗. Equation (4) is shown below.
∑𝑛𝑘 =1 (𝑥 𝑣 × 𝑥 𝑣 )
𝑖 𝑗
𝑆(𝑖 , 𝑗) =
2 2
√∑𝑛𝑘 =1(𝑥 𝑣𝑖 ) × √∑𝑛𝑘=1 ( 𝑥 𝑣𝑗 )
Where, 𝑛 represents the dimension represented by the node
vector.
Then, according to the similarity between nodes 𝑖 and 𝑗, we
calculate the distance 𝐷 (𝑖, 𝑗) from node 𝑖 to 𝑗 as shown in
Equation (5).
𝐷(𝑖 , 𝑗) = 1 − 𝑆(𝑖, 𝑗) (5)
B. LOCAL DENSITY CALCULATION
In the density peak clustering algorithm, according to
Equations (1) and (2), the local density of node 𝑖 refers to the
number of nodes near node 𝑖 within the cutoff distance.
However, in the network topology, nodes do not exist
independently, but there are some connections, that is, edges
in the network. The direct connection of two nodes means a
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closer connection, while the indirect connection means a
weaker connection. Therefore, the local density of a node
cannot be simply calculated based on the number of nodes
around a node in the network.
As shown in Figure 3 (a) and (d), the number of neighbors
of node A in Figure 3 (a) and (d) is 3. However, it can be seen
from the figure that the local density of node A in (a) is
obviously greater than the local density of node A in (d).
Therefore, when calculating the node density, not only the
number of neighbor nodes of the node, but also the tightness
of the connections around the node must be considered. So,
this paper uses degree and local clustering coefficient to
calculate the local density of nodes, as shown in Equation (6).
2×∑𝑗 ,ℎ 𝑎 𝑗ℎ 𝑎 𝑖𝑗𝑎 𝑖ℎ 𝑎 𝑗𝑖𝑎 ℎ𝑖
𝜌𝑖 = 𝑘𝑖 + (6)
𝑘𝑖 (𝑘𝑖 −1)
Where, 𝑘𝑖 represents the degree of the node.
FIGURE 3. Four different structure network diagrams with node A
degree of 3.
According to Equation (6) to calculate the local density of
node A in different structure network graphs, then (a) the local
density of node A in the graph network graph is 3 +
(2 × 3)⁄ (3 × 2) = 4. The local density of node A in Figure
(b) is 3 + (2 × 2)⁄ (3 × 2) ≈ 3.67. The local density of node
A in Figure (c) is 3 + (2 × 1)⁄ (3 × 2) ≈ 3.33 . The local
density of node A in Figure (d) is 3 + (2 × 0)⁄ (3 × 2) = 3.
According to Equation (3), if node 𝑖 is the point of local
maximum density, the relative distance 𝛿𝑖 of node 𝑖 is the
distance between node 𝑗 and node 𝑖 that is closest to node 𝑖.If
the node 𝑖 is the non-local maximum density point, the relative
(4)
distance 𝛿𝑖 of the node 𝑖 is the distance between the node 𝑗
and the node 𝑖 with the local density higher than the node 𝑖
and the closest to the node 𝑖.
C. SELECTION OF THE CORES
According to the previous section, the local density ρ and
relative distance δ of each node in the network can be obtained.
In DPC algorithm, the key step is to obtain the points with
larger 𝜌 and 𝛿 as the cluster center according to the decision
graph. However, only individual points obviously have larger
𝜌 and 𝛿, and in the actual network, some communities have
large changes in scale, resulting in a relatively small density of
individual community centers. For such points, the decision
chart is not prominent. Therefore, there may be two different
situations. One is that both 𝜌 and 𝛿 are large, the other is that
one is relatively large, and the other is relatively small. In order
to select the center point of the community more accurately,
this article will take three steps to select.
 This article has been accepted for publication in a future issue of this journal, but has not been fully edited. Content may change prior to final publication. Citation information: DOI
10.1109/ACCESS.2020.3041472, IEEE Access
H. Liu, G. Li: Ov erlapping Community Detection Method Based on Network Representation Learning and Density Peaks
First, according to the decision diagram, select the point
where the local density 𝜌 and the relative distance 𝛿 are
significantly larger as the center point.
Next, considering the second case, the NRLDP algorithm
selects the community center point by calculating the product
of 𝜌 and 𝛿, and the product represents the center value of the
node with 𝛾. Before calculating 𝛾, you need to normalize 𝜌
and 𝛿 to ensure that they are in the same range. The calculation
formulas are shown in Equation (7) and (8).
𝜌𝑖 − min (𝜌)
𝜌𝑖∗ = (7)
max (𝜌 ) − min(𝜌 )
𝛿𝑖 − min(𝛿 )
𝛿𝑖∗ =
max (𝛿 ) − min(𝛿 )
Then, we use Equation (9) to calculate the center value of node
𝑖. Then, we arrange the center value in ascending order, and
we can get the change of the node center value from small to
large. The larger the center value, the more likely the node 𝑖
becomes the center point.
𝛾𝑖 = 𝜌𝑖∗ × 𝛿𝑖∗
At last, because in DPC algorithm, clusters are disjoint
clusters, and in the process of community detection, there are
often overlapping nodes in the network, and overlapping
nodes are generally located at the edge of the community.
Therefore, the relative distance between it and the nearest node
with higher local density is relatively large, and if the
overlapping node belongs to multiple communities, it may
have higher local density, and it is easy to be selected as the
center point in the center list. The neighbor nodes of
overlapping nodes will be closer to a certain community and
have a closer connection. Their local density is relatively
larger than that of overlapping nodes. In order to make the
center point not including overlapping nodes, this paper
compares the average local density of neighbor nodes, and
deletes the nodes that are less than the average local density of
neighbor nodes from the center list.
D. OVERLAPPING ALLOCATION OF REMAINING
NODES
According to the central point selected by the NRLDP
algorithm in the previous section, the overlapping
communities are detected for the remaining nodes . In the
density peak clustering algorithm, allocating the remaining
sample points is to allocate the remaining sample points to the
clusters that are closest and whose local density is greaterthan
the current center point. This method makes each remaining
sample point belong to only one cluster. Therefore, this paper
improve the method to realize the overlapping allocation of the
remaining nodes. The specific allocation steps are as follows:
First, we assume that the number of community center
points obtained is 𝑚, set the label for each community as 𝑐 =
{𝑐1 , 𝑐2 , … , 𝑐𝑚 }.
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Second, we calculate the attribution degree of node 𝑖 ,
represented by 𝑝𝑖 ,𝑐 = {𝑝𝑖 ,𝑐 1 , 𝑝𝑖,𝑐 2 , … , 𝑝𝑖,𝑐 𝑚 } , with a value
range of 0-1. The greater the degree of belonging of a node to
a certain community, the greater the probability that the node
is assigned to the community. First, we set the attribution
degree corresponding to the community to which the center
point belongs to 1, and the attribution degree of th e center
point to other communities is set to 0. For example, the
community label corresponding to the center point 3 is 𝑐2 ,
except that 𝑝3,𝑐 2 is 1, the rest are 0, that is, 𝑝3,𝑐 2 =
{0,1,0, … ,0}. Then, we use Equation (10) to calculate the
degree of belonging of the remaining nodes.
𝑆(𝑖,𝑗)
(8) 𝑝𝑖 ,𝑐 = ∑𝑗 ∈𝑛𝑒𝑖𝑔ℎ ∑ 𝑝𝑗 ,𝑐 (10)
𝑘 ∈𝑛𝑒𝑖𝑔ℎ 𝑆( 𝑖,𝑘)
where, 𝑆(𝑖, 𝑗) is the similarity between nodes 𝑖 and 𝑗 , and
neigh is the N neighbor nodes with greater local density than
node 𝑖.
Most people in social networks will be influenced by
friends. People are more inclined to be with their friends.
Therefore, the more likely it is to be in a community with
(9) friends. When calculating node affiliation, this paper considers
the similarity between node 𝑖 and N neighbor nodes with a
greater local density than node 𝑖 on the one hand, and
considers the affiliation degree of N neighbor nodes on the
other hand. In Equation (10), it means that the greater the
similarity between a neighbor node 𝑗 and 𝑖, and the greater the
degree of belonging of 𝑗 to a certain community, the greater
the degree of belonging of node 𝑖 to the community.
Third, we assume that the ratio of the degree of belonging
of node 𝑖 to the 𝑐𝑟 community to the degree of belonging to
the 𝑐𝑡 community is greater than the threshold 𝜎, that is,
𝑝𝑖 ,𝑐 𝑟
⁄𝑝𝑖,𝑐 ≥ 𝜎, then node 𝑖 is allocated to the communities 𝑐𝑟
𝑡
and 𝑐𝑡 at the same time. That is to say, the degree of belonging
of the node 𝑖 to the community 𝑐𝑟 and 𝑐𝑡 is not much different,
that is, the node i is an overlapping node, which belongs to
both the community 𝑐𝑟 and the community 𝑐𝑡 .
IV. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS AND ANALYSIS
To verify the feasibility and effectiveness of our proposed
method, we compare the algorithms of recent years on the real
network dataset and artificial synthetic network dataset. The
environment is carried on a PC(Windows10 64bit, Intel(R)
Core(TM) i5-7400 CPU @3.00GHz, 8GB RAM).
A. EXPERIMENTAL DATASETS
1) REAL WORLD NETWORK
Karate Club Network [25]. This data set describes the friend
relationship between members of a karate club in a certain
university in the United States.
Dolphin Network [26]. This data set describes the
relationship between 62 bottlenose dolphins in New Zealand.
The middle edge of the network indicates that two dolphins
often move together.
 This article has been accepted for publication in a future issue of this journal, but has not been fully edited. Content may change prior to final publication. Citation information: DOI
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H. Liu, G. Li: Ov erlapping Community Detection Method Based on Network Representation Learning and Density Peaks

TABLE 2. Description of LFR benchmark parameters.

Football is an American college football game network [27].
This data describes the game situation between 115 college
teams divided into 12 leagues in a football league in the United Parameters Description
States. N Number of nodes
Polbooks is a network of American political books [28].
k Average degree
This data set describes the sales network of American political
books on Amazon during the 2004 US presidential election. maxk Maximum degree
Lesmis is a network of characters in the novel [29]. This 𝜇 Mixing parameter
data set describes the network of characters in Hugo's famous t1 Minus exponent for the degree sequence
novel "Les Miserables". t2 Minus exponent for the community size distribution
Polblogs is an American blog political orientation network minc Minimum for community sizes
[30]. This dataset describes the citations of blogs of different maxc Maximum for the community sizes
political orientations during the 2004 US presidential election.
On Number of overlapping nodes
The specific information of the above real public datasets is
Om Number of memberships of the overlapping nodes
shown in Table 1.
C Average clustering coefficient
TABLE 1. Description of real world networks.

Data sets Vertex number Edge number Average degree

TABLE 3. Parameter setting information of synthetic network.
Karate 34 78 4.6
Dolphin 62 159 5.1
Para
Football 115 613 10.6 mete 𝑁1 𝑁2 𝑁3 𝑁4 𝑁5
Polbooks 105 441 8.4 rs
Lesmis 77 254 6.6 N 1000 2000 3000 4000 5000
k {5,10} {5,10} {5,10} {5,10} {5,10}
Polblogs 1224 19022 27.3
max
{20,50} {20,50} {20,50} {20,50} {20,50}
k
𝜇 {0.1,0.3} 0.1 0.1 0.1 0.1
2) SYNTHETIC NETWORK
The experiment in this paper uses the widely used artificial minc {10,20} {10,20} {10,20} {10,20} {10,20}
benchmark network program LFR Benchmark [31] in recent maxc {50,100} {50,100} {50,100} {50,100} {50,100}
years to generate artificial synthetic network data sets. The {100,500
𝑂𝑛 200 300 400 500
}
artificial network generated by this program can well show the
𝑂𝑚 2-8 2 2 2 2
community structure of the network and can also simulate the
real network well. The LFR benchmark program needs to
adjust parameters to generate artificial synthetic networks of
different scales and connection strengths. The specific compare and analyze the real network and artificial network
parameters are described in Table 2. Among them, the value data sets to evaluate the accuracy of the NRLDP algorithm in
of 𝜇 ranges from 0 to 1. The larger the value of 𝜇, the weaker this paper.
the connection, the more complex the network structure, and
the more difficult to detect the community structure in the 2) EVALUATION INDICATOR
network. The evaluation indicators used in this paper are EQ [38] and
This paper uses the LFR benchmark program to generate 5 Normalized Mutual Information [39] (NMI) which are
groups of artificial networks of different scales. The basic commonly used in overlapping community detection
parameter settings of the experiment are shown in Table 3. algorithms.
The overlapping modularity (EQ) is used to evaluate the
B. EXPERIMENTAL METHOD AND EVALUATION quality of the overlapping community structure. The closer the
INDICATOR EQ value is to 1, the better the quality of the overlapping
1) EXPERIMENTAL METHOD community structure divided by the algorithm. The definition
In order to verify the effectiveness and feasibility of our of EQ is as follows.
proposed method, we compare NRLDP with related
algorithms and classic algorithms in recent years. The selected 𝑐𝑙
comparison algorithms are: OCDRDD [32] algorithm, DCN 1 1 𝑘(𝑖) 𝑘 (𝑗)
𝐸𝑄 = ∑ ∑ (𝐴 (𝑖, 𝑗) − ) (11)
[33] algorithm, CDRS [34] Algorithm, LDC [35] algorithm, 2𝑚 𝑂(𝑖 ) 𝑂(𝑗) 2𝑚
𝑙=1 𝑖∈𝑙,𝑗∈𝑙
Multiscale [36] algorithm, COPRA [37] algorithm. We use
different evaluation indicators and these algorithms to

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 This article has been accepted for publication in a future issue of this journal, but has not been fully edited. Content may change prior to final publication. Citation information: DOI
10.1109/ACCESS.2020.3041472, IEEE Access
H. Liu, G. Li: Ov erlapping Community Detection Method Based on Network Representation Learning and Density Peaks

Where, m represents the number of edges in the network, and

𝑐𝑙 represents the lth community. 𝑂(𝑖 ) and 𝑂 (𝑗) respectively
represent the number of communities to which nodes 𝑖 and 𝑗
belong. 𝐴(𝑖 , 𝑗) represents the adjacency matrix of the network.
𝑘 (𝑖) and 𝑘(𝑗) represent the degrees of nodes 𝑖 and 𝑗 ,
respectively.
Standardized mutual information NMI is an information
theory method used to measure the difference between two
sets. It is used to evaluate the difference between the result of
the network division of the algorithm and the real division
result. The closer the NMI value is to 1, the closer the division
result is to the real division. result. The definition of NMI is as
follows.
𝑁 ∙𝑁
−2 ∑𝑖=1
𝐶𝐴
∑𝑗𝐶=1 𝑁𝑖𝑗 ∙ log ( 𝑖𝑗 )
𝐵 𝑁𝑖 , 𝑁𝑗
(
𝑁𝑀𝐼 𝐴, 𝐵 = )
𝑁𝑖 𝑗=1 𝑁𝑗 (12)
∑𝑖=1 𝑁 𝑖 ∙ log ( ) + ∑ 𝑁𝑗 ∙ log ( ) (b)
𝐶𝐴 𝑁 𝐶𝐵 𝑁
FIGURE 4. Threshold 𝝈 experiment.

Where, 𝐶𝐴 is the standard division result, 𝐶𝐵 is the algorithm
division result, 𝑁𝑖𝑗 represents the number of public nodes
between the 𝑖 𝑡ℎ community in 𝐶𝐴 and the 𝑗 𝑡ℎ community in
𝐶𝐵, 𝑁 is the total number of nodes in the network, and 𝑁𝑖
represents 𝐶𝐴 The number of nodes in the 𝑖 𝑡ℎ community in
𝐶𝐵, 𝑁𝑗 represents the number of nodes in the 𝑗 𝑡ℎ community
in 𝐶𝐵.
C. PARAMETER EXPERIMENT
1) THRESHOLD IN NRLDP ALGORITHM
In order to verify the influence of the threshold 𝜎 given by the
NRLDP algorithm in the process of assigning nodes on the
detection results of different networks, we carried out
experiments on 5 different networks of 𝑁1, 𝑁2 , 𝑁3 , 𝑁4 , and
𝑁5 .
(a)
As shown in Figure 4, for different 𝜎 values, the EQ value
and the NMI value are not much different on data sets of
different scales. It can be seen that the threshold σ given by
the NRLDP algorithm in the process of assigning nodes has
little effect on the network detection results. Therefore, the
threshold σ=0.9 is set in the following experiments.
2) PARAMETERS IN SYNTHETIC NETWORK
Different network structures may result in different algorithm
performance. In order to test which parameters of the NRLDP
algorithm are affected by the network, this experiment is
mainly carried out from the following aspects.
First, we test the influence of the degree of nodes in the
network, the scale of the network, and the scale of the
community in the network on the algorithm. The parameter k
is the average degree of the node, and other parameters are
controlled to be the same. The k is set to 5 and 10, and the
𝑚𝑎𝑥𝑘 is 20 and 50 respectively. The size of the community in
the network is set to (20, 100) for the large community and (10,
50) for the small community. Experiments were carried out on
5 networks of different sizes, 𝑁1, 𝑁2 , 𝑁3 , 𝑁4 , and 𝑁5 . As
shown in Figure 5(a), on data sets of different network sizes,
the NMI value with a node average degree of 10 is generally
larger. Because the average value of most large-scale real
social networks is around 10, the experimental results are in
line with the actual situation. According to Figure 4 and Figure
5 (a) and (b), it can be seen that as the network scale increases,
most of the curve changes in the figure are not obvious. It can
be seen that the network size has little effect on the NRLDP
algorithm. Therefore, the next experiment chooses the
network size 𝑁1 = 1000 to test the influence of the internal
connection strength and overlap on the algorithm. The
parameter 𝜇 is the internal connection strength coefficient of
the community, which is set to 0.1 and 0.3 respectively. On is
set to 100 and 500 respectively. Om is set to 2, 4, 6, 8
respectively. In Figure 5 (c), the larger the 𝜇 value, the more
complex the community structure in the network, and the more

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 This article has been accepted for publication in a future issue of this journal, but has not been fully edited. Content may change prior to final publication. Citation information: DOI
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H. Liu, G. Li: Ov erlapping Community Detection Method Based on Network Representation Learning and Density Peaks

TABLE 4. The EQ value of different algorithms on six networks.

NRLDP OCDRDD DCN CDRS LDC Multiscale COPRA

Karate 0.3986 0.3715 0.3715 0.3434 0.2469 0.2599 0.1654
Dolphin 0.3874 0.3801 0.3787 0.3717 0.3693 0.327 0.3759
Football 0.5505 0.3585 0.3534 0.551 0.2415 0.384 0.5863
Polbooks 0.4956 0.4993 0.4456 0.3777 0.4339 0.2185 0.4802
Lesmis 0.4197 0.483 0.1102 0.4386 0.1597 0.3866 0.4997
Polblogs 0.4029 0.2967 0.1269 0.14 0.078 — 0.3159
Avg 0.4425 0.3981 0.2977 0.3704 0.2548 0.3152 0.4039

(a) (b)

(c) (d)
FIGURE 6. The NMI value of different algorithms on synthetic network.
FIGURE 5. Experiment of parameters on synthetic network.

difficult it is to detect. In Figure 5 (d), the degree of
community overlap also has a certain impact on the algorithm.
The greater the degree of overlap, the lower the algorithm
performance.
D. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS ON REAL WORLD
NETWORK.
In order to verify the method proposed in this paper, this
section experiments on 6 real network data sets, and selects
EQ as a measurement index, and compares them with 6
community detection algorithms. The results are shown in
Table 4.
According to the EQ value of each algorithm on the real
world network data set, it can be known that the EQ value of
the NRLDP algorithm proposed in this paper on the 6 data sets
is greater than that of the DCN algorithm, LDC algorithm and
Multiscale algorithm. Except that the EQ value on the
Polbooks data set is slightly smaller than the OCDRDD
algorithm, the others are all larger than the OCDRDD
algorithm. On the Football dataset and Lemis dataset, the
CDRS algorithm and the COPRA algorithm have achieved
better results, but overall the average value of the NRLDP
algorithm is greater than 6 algorithms . Therefore, it can be said
that NRLDP algorithm is better than OCDRDD algorithm,
DCN algorithm, CDRS algorithm, LDC algorithm, Multiscale
algorithm, COPRA algorithm on the real word network
datasets.
E. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS ON SYNTHETIC
NETWORK.
To further verify the effectiveness and feasibility of the
NRLDP algorithm. The experiment in this section is on the
same artificial synthetic network, the number of network
nodes is 1000, k=10, μ=0.1, the community size is 20 to 100,
On=10%, and standardized mutual information NMI is
selected as the measurement indicator. The selected
comparison algorithms are DCN algorithm, CDRS algorithm,
LDC algorithm, Multiscale algorithm, COPRA algorithm, and
the results are shown in Figure 6. It can be seen from the
Figure 6 that although the NRLDP algorithm decreases as the
number of community membership Om of overlapping nodes
increases, the NMI value of Om before 4 is greater than the

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 This article has been accepted for publication in a future issue of this journal, but has not been fully edited. Content may change prior to final publication. Citation information: DOI
10.1109/ACCESS.2020.3041472, IEEE Access
H. Liu, G. Li: Ov erlapping Community Detection Method Based on Network Representation Learning and Density Peaks
other 6 algorithms. In most cases in the real world, the number
of communities belonging to overlapping nodes does not
exceed 5. Therefore, in a certain sense, the NRLDP algorithm
has certain advantages.
V. CONCLUSION
This paper proposes an overlapping community d etection
method (NRLDP) based on network representation learning
and density peaks. In order to deal with high-dimensional and
complex network data, NRLDP first uses network
representation learning technology to represent non-weighted
networks or weighted networks with low-dimensional vectors.
Then it uses the cosine similarity to calculate the distance
between nodes and improves the local density calculation
method. The core nodes are selected according to the relative
distance and local density, and the remaining nodes are finally
allocated to detect the overlapping community structure of the
unweighted network or the weighted network. The
experimental results both on synthetic and real networks
demonstrate performance of our method, it gets highly
accurate and effective for overlapping community detection.
For future work, we will consider using low-dimensional
vectors to represent the network with node and edge attribute
information, and further enhance the algorithm to detect more
complex network community structures.
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