Abstract—The Louvain algorithm is well known for its high speed for detecting community structure in networks. In this paper, first, we analyze the Louvain algorithm as the preliminary experiment to uncover the processes that cause wasted computational time and their characteristics. Then based on this, we propose the Louvain Prune algorithm. The experiments show that the Louvain Prune algorithm significantly reduces computational time by up to 90%, and retains almost the same quality as the original Louvain algorithm.

Index Terms—Community detection, complex networks, Louvain algorithm, Heuristic, pruning.

The authors are with the Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan.

Cite:Naoto Ozaki, Hiroshi Tezuka, Mary Inaba, "A Simple Acceleration Method for the Louvain Algorithm," International Journal of Computer and Electrical Engineering vol. 8, no. 3, pp. 207-218, 2016.