Many real-world networks display a natural bipartite structure. It is necessary and important to study the bipartite networks by using the bipartite structure of the data. Here we propose a modification of the clustering coefficient given by the fraction of cycles with size four in bipartite networks. Then we compare the two definitions in a special graph, and the results show that the modification one is better to character the network. Next we define a edge-clustering coefficient of bipartite networks to detect the community structure in original bipartite networks.
In bipartite networks, community structures are restricted to being disassortative, in that nodes of one type are grouped according to common patterns of connection with nodes of the other type. This makes the stochastic block model (SBM), a highly flexible generative model for networks with block structure, an intuitive choice for bipartite community detection. However, typical formulations of the SBM do not make use of the special structure of bipartite networks. Here we introduce a Bayesian nonparametric formulation of the SBM and a corresponding algorithm to efficiently find communities in bipartite networks which parsimoniously chooses the number of communities. The biSBM improves community detection results over general SBMs when data are noisy, improves the model resolution limit by a factor of $sqrt{2}$, and expands our understanding of the complicated optimization landscape associated with community detection tasks. A direct comparison of certain terms of the prior distributions in the biSBM and a related high-resolution hierarchical SBM also reveals a counterintuitive regime of community detection problems, populated by smaller and sparser networks, where nonhierarchical models outperform their more flexible counterpart.
Bipartite networks are a common type of network data in which there are two types of vertices, and only vertices of different types can be connected. While bipartite networks exhibit community structure like their unipartite counterparts, existing approaches to bipartite community detection have drawbacks, including implicit parameter choices, loss of information through one-mode projections, and lack of interpretability. Here we solve the community detection problem for bipartite networks by formulating a bipartite stochastic block model, which explicitly includes vertex type information and may be trivially extended to $k$-partite networks. This bipartite stochastic block model yields a projection-free and statistically principled method for community detection that makes clear assumptions and parameter choices and yields interpretable results. We demonstrate this models ability to efficiently and accurately find community structure in synthetic bipartite networks with known structure and in real-world bipartite networks with unknown structure, and we characterize its performance in practical contexts.
Many networks in nature, society and technology are characterized by a mesoscopic level of organization, with groups of nodes forming tightly connected units, called communities or modules, that are only weakly linked to each other. Uncovering this community structure is one of the most important problems in the field of complex networks. Networks often show a hierarchical organization, with communities embedded within other communities; moreover, nodes can be shared between different communities. Here we present the first algorithm that finds both overlapping communities and the hierarchical structure. The method is based on the local optimization of a fitness function. Community structure is revealed by peaks in the fitness histogram. The resolution can be tuned by a parameter enabling to investigate different hierarchical levels of organization. Tests on real and artificial networks give excellent results.
It has been shown that the communities of complex networks often overlap with each other. However, there is no effective method to quantify the overlapping community structure. In this paper, we propose a metric to address this problem. Instead of assuming that one node can only belong to one community, our metric assumes that a maximal clique only belongs to one community. In this way, the overlaps between communities are allowed. To identify the overlapping community structure, we construct a maximal clique network from the original network, and prove that the optimization of our metric on the original network is equivalent to the optimization of Newmans modularity on the maximal clique network. Thus the overlapping community structure can be identified through partitioning the maximal clique network using any modularity optimization method. The effectiveness of our metric is demonstrated by extensive tests on both the artificial networks and the real world networks with known community structure. The application to the word association network also reproduces excellent results.
Empirical studies show that real world networks often exhibit multiple scales of topological descriptions. However, it is still an open problem how to identify the intrinsic multiple scales of networks. In this article, we consider detecting the multi-scale community structure of network from the perspective of dimension reduction. According to this perspective, a covariance matrix of network is defined to uncover the multi-scale community structure through the translation and rotation transformations. It is proved that the covariance matrix is the unbiased version of the well-known modularity matrix. We then point out that the translation and rotation transformations fail to deal with the heterogeneous network, which is very common in nature and society. To address this problem, a correlation matrix is proposed through introducing the rescaling transformation into the covariance matrix. Extensive tests on real world and artificial networks demonstrate that the correlation matrix significantly outperforms the covariance matrix, identically the modularity matrix, as regards identifying the multi-scale community structure of network. This work provides a novel perspective to the identification of community structure and thus various dimension reduction methods might be used for the identification of community structure. Through introducing the correlation matrix, we further conclude that the rescaling transformation is crucial to identify the multi-scale community structure of network, as well as the translation and rotation transformations.