Motivated by social and biological interactions, a novel type of phase transition model is provided in order to investigate the emergence of the clustering phenomenon in networks. The model has two types of interactions: one is attractive and the other is repulsive. In each iteration, the phase of a node (or an agent) moves toward the average phase of its neighbors and moves away from the average phase of its non-neighbors. The velocities of the two types of phase transition are controlled by two parameters, respectively. It is found that the phase transition phenomenon is closely related to the topological structure of the underlying network, and thus can be applied to identify its communities and overlapping groups. By giving each node of the network a randomly generated initial phase and updating these phases by the phase transition model until they reach stability, one or two communities will be detected according to the nodes’ stable phases, confusable nodes are moved into a set named Of. By removing the detected communities and the nodes in Of, another one or two communities will be detected by an iteration of the algorithm, …. In this way, all communities and the overlapping nodes are detected. Simulations on both real-world networks and the LFR benchmark graphs have verified the efficiency of the proposed scheme.
