Community Detection in Large-Scale Complex Networks via Structural Entropy Game

Community detection is a critical task in graph theory, social network analysis, and bioinformatics, where communities are defined as clusters of densely interconnected nodes. However, detecting communities in large-scale networks with millions of nodes and billions of edges remains challenging due to the inefficiency and unreliability of existing methods. Moreover, many current approaches are limited to specific graph types, such as unweighted or undirected graphs, reducing their broader applicability. To address these issues, we propose a novel heuristic community detection algorithm, termed CoDeSEG, which identifies communities by minimizing the network’s two-dimensional (2D) structural entropy within a potential game framework. In the game, nodes decide to stay in the current community or move to another based on a strategy that maximizes the 2D structural entropy utility function. Additionally, we introduce a structural entropy-based node overlapping heuristic for detecting overlapping communities, with a near-linear time complexity. Experimental results on real-world networks demonstrate that CoDeSEG is the fastest method available and achieves state-of-the-art performance in overlapping normalized mutual information (ONMI) and F1 scores.