Decentralized mining social network communities with agents

Network community mining algorithms aim at efficiently and effectively discovering all such communities from a given network. Many related methods have been proposed and applied to different areas including social network analysis, gene network analysis and web clustering engines. Most of the existing methods for mining communities are centralized. In this paper, we present a multi‐agent based decentralized algorithm, in which a group of autonomous agents work together to mine a network through a proposed self‐aggregation and self‐organization mechanism. Thanks to its decentralized feature, our method is potentially suitable for dealing with distributed networks, whose global structures are hard to obtain due to their geographical distributions, decentralized controls or huge sizes. The effectiveness of our method has been tested against different benchmark networks.