Nearest Neighbor search in Complex Network for Community Detection

Abstract: Nearest neighbor search is a basic computational tool used extensively in almost research domains of computer science specially when dealing with large amount of data. However, the use of nearest neighbor search is restricted for the purpose of algorithmic development by the existence of the notion of nearness among the data points. The recent trend of research is on large, complex networks and their structural analysis, where nodes represent entities and edges represent any kind of relation between entities. Community detection in complex network is an important problem of much interest. In general, a community detection algorithm represents an objective function and captures the communities by optimizing it to extract the interesting communities for the user. In this article, we have studied the nearest neighbor search problem in complex network via the development of a suitable notion of nearness. Initially, we have studied and analyzed the exact nearest neighbor search using metric tree on proposed metric space constructed from complex network. After, the approximate nearest neighbor search problem is studied using locality sensitive hashing. For evaluation of the proposed nearest neighbor search on complex network we applied it in community detection problem. The results obtained using our methods are very competitive with most of the well known algorithms exists in the literature and this is verified on collection of real networks. On the other-hand, it can be observed that time taken by our algorithm is quite less compared to popular methods.