Advances in Network Clustering and Blockmodeling

5Label Propagation for Clustering

Lovro Šubelj

University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Computer and Information Science, Ljubljana, Slovenia

Label propagation is a heuristic method initially proposed for community detection in networks [26,50], while the method can be adopted also for other types of network clustering and partitioning [5,28,39,62]. Among all the approaches and techniques described in this book, label propagation is neither the most accurate nor the most robust method. It is, however, without doubt one of the simplest and fastest clustering methods. Label propagation can be implemented with a few lines of programming code and applied to networks with hundreds of millions of nodes and edges on a standard computer, which is true only for a handful of other methods in the literature.

In this chapter, we present the basic framework of label propagation, review different advances and extensions of the original method, and highlight its equivalences with other approaches. We show how label propagation can be used effectively for large-scale community detection, graph partitioning, and identification of structurally equivalent nodes and other network structures. We conclude the chapter with a summary of label propagation methods and suggestions for future research.

5.1 Label Propagation Method

The label propagation method was introduced by Raghavan et al. [50] for detecting non-overlapping communities in large networks. There exist multiple interpretations of network ...