Communities are of great importance for understanding graph structures in
social networks. Some existing community detection algorithms use a single
prototype to represent each group. In real applications, this may not
adequately model the different types of communities and hence limits the
clustering performance on social networks. To address this problem, a
Similarity-based Multi-Prototype (SMP) community detection approach is proposed
in this paper. In SMP, vertices in each community carry various weights to
describe their degree of representativeness. This mechanism enables each
community to be represented by more than one node. The centrality of nodes is
used to calculate prototype weights, while similarity is utilized to guide us
to partitioning the graph. Experimental results on computer generated and
real-world networks clearly show that SMP performs well for detecting
communities. Moreover, the method could provide richer information for the
inner structure of the detected communities with the help of prototype weights
compared with the existing community detection models
