The invention relates to the field of overlapping
community discovery in complex networks, discloses a
preference learning mechanism-based overlapping
community discovery method and
system, and aims at rapidly, efficiently, correctly and stably detecting overlapping communities in complex networks through considering preference relationships. The method comprises the following steps of: distributing a unique
label for each node, setting a membership degree, to the
label, of the node, and defining significance of the node; calculating preference degrees between the nodes; selecting a
learning object to normalize the nodes according to the preference degrees, so as to obtain each node
relational graph after iteration; and continuously carrying iteration on the basis of each node
relational graph after the last iteration, doing the rest in the same manner until iteration is carried out for a set sequence to obtain each final node
relational graph, dividing the nodes with same labels intoa same
community, considering the nodes with at least two labels as overlapping nodes, and considering communities where the overlapping nodes are located as overlapping communities.