Cluster analysis algorithms | Algorithms
Chinese whispers (clustering method)
Chinese whispers is a clustering method used in network science named after the famous whispering game. Clustering methods are basically used to identify communities of nodes or links in a given network. This algorithm was designed by and in 2005. The name comes from the fact that the process can be modeled as a separation of communities where the nodes send the same type of information to each other. Chinese whispers is a hard partitioning, randomized, flat clustering (no hierarchical relations between clusters) method. The random property means that running the process on the same network several times can lead to different results, while because of hard partitioning one node can only belong to one cluster at a given moment. The original algorithm is applicable to undirected, weighted and unweighted graphs. Chinese whispers is time linear which means that it is extremely fast even if the number of nodes and links are very high in the network. (Wikipedia).
