Local community detection via flow propagation

We propose a flow propagation algorithm (FlowPro) that finds the community surrounding a node in a complex network. In each iteration of the main process of FlowPro, the initial node propagates a flow that is shared among its neighbors. Each node is able to store, propagate to its neighbors, and return, part of the flow it receives to the initial node. When the algorithm converges, the flow stored in the nodes that belong to the community of the initial node, is generally higher than the flow stored in the rest of the graph nodes, thus the requested community emerges. The novelty of the proposed approach lies in the fact that FlowPro is local, allows to visualize the community and does not require the knowledge of the entire graph as most of the existing methods found in the literature. This makes possible the application of FlowPro in extremely large graphs or in cases where the entire graph is unknown like in most social networks.