No Arabic abstract
A distinguishing property of communities in networks is that cycles are more prevalent within communities than across communities. Thus, the detection of these communities may be aided through the incorporation of measures of the local richness of the cyclic structure. In this paper, we introduce renewal non-backtracking random walks (RNBRW) as a way of quantifying this structure. RNBRW gives a weight to each edge equal to the probability that a non-backtracking random walk completes a cycle with that edge. Hence, edges with larger weights may be thought of as more important to the formation of cycles. Of note, since separate random walks can be performed in parallel, RNBRW weights can be estimated very quickly, even for large graphs. We give simulation results showing that pre-weighting edges through RNBRW may substantially improve the performance of common community detection algorithms. Our results suggest that RNBRW is especially efficient for the challenging case of detecting communities in sparse graphs.
A distinguishing property of communities in networks is that cycles are more prevalent within communities than across communities. Thus, the detection of these communities may be aided through the incorporation of measures of the local richness of the cyclic structure. In this paper, we introduce renewal non-backtracking random walks (RNBRW) as a way of quantifying this structure. RNBRW gives a weight to each edge equal to the probability that a non-backtracking random walk completes a cycle with that edge. Hence, edges with larger weights may be thought of as more important to the formation of cycles. Of note, since separate random walks can be performed in parallel, RNBRW weights can be estimated very quickly, even for large graphs. We give simulation results showing that pre-weighting edges through RNBRW may substantially improve the performance of common community detection algorithms. Our results suggest that RNBRW is especially efficient for the challenging case of detecting communities in sparse graphs.
With invaluable theoretical and practical benefits, the problem of partitioning networks for community structures has attracted significant research attention in scientific and engineering disciplines. In literature, Newmans modularity measure is routinely applied to quantify the quality of a given partition, and thereby maximizing the measure provides a principled way of detecting communities in networks. Unfortunately, the exact optimization of the measure is computationally NP-complete and only applicable to very small networks. Approximation approaches have to be sought to scale to large networks. To address the computational issue, we proposed a new method to identify the partition decisions. Coupled with an iterative rounding strategy and a fast constrained power method, our work achieves tight and effective spectral relaxations. The proposed method was evaluated thoroughly on both real and synthetic networks. Compared with state-of-the-art approaches, the method obtained comparable, if not better, qualities. Meanwhile, it is highly suitable for parallel execution and reported a nearly linear improvement in running speed when increasing the number of computing nodes, which thereby provides a practical tool for partitioning very large networks.
In a graph, a community may be loosely defined as a group of nodes that are more closely connected to one another than to the rest of the graph. While there are a variety of metrics that can be used to specify the quality of a given community, one common theme is that flows tend to stay within communities. Hence, we expect cycles to play an important role in community detection. For undirected graphs, the importance of triangles -- an undirected 3-cycle -- has been known for a long time and can be used to improve community detection. In directed graphs, the situation is more nuanced. The smallest cycle is simply two nodes with a reciprocal connection, and using information about reciprocation has proven to improve community detection. Our new idea is based on the four types of directed triangles that contain cycles. To identify communities in directed networks, then, we propose an undirected edge-weighting scheme based on the type of the directed triangles in which edges are involved. We also propose a new metric on quality of the communities that is based on the number of 3-cycles that are split across communities. To demonstrate the impact of our new weighting, we use the standard METIS graph partitioning tool to determine communities and show experimentally that the resulting communities result in fewer 3-cycles being cut. The magnitude of the effect varies between a 10 and 50% reduction, and we also find evidence that this weighting scheme improves a task where plausible ground-truth communities are known.
We present a network community-detection technique based on properties that emerge from a nature-inspired system of aligning particles. Initially, each vertex is assigned a random-direction unit vector. A nonlinear dynamic law is established so that neighboring vertices try to become aligned with each other. After some time, the system stops and edges that connect the least-aligned pairs of vertices are removed. Then the evolution starts over without the removed edges, and after enough number of removal rounds, each community becomes a connected component. The proposed approach is evaluated using widely-accepted benchmarks and real-world networks. Experimental results reveal that the method is robust and excels on a wide variety of networks. Moreover, for large sparse networks, the edge-removal process runs in quasilinear time, which enables application in large-scale networks.
Community detection is a significant and challenging task in network research. Nowadays, plenty of attention has been focused on local methods of community detection. Among them, community detection with a greedy algorithm typically starts from the identification of local essential nodes called central nodes of the network; communities expand later from these central nodes by optimizing a modularity function. In this paper, we propose a new central node indicator and a new modularity function. Our central node indicator, which we call local centrality indicator (LCI), is as efficient as the well-known global maximal degree indicator and local maximal degree indicator; on certain special network structure, LCI performs even better. On the other hand, our modularity function F2 overcomes certain disadvantages,such as the resolution limit problem,of the modularity functions raised in previous literature. Combined with a greedy algorithm, LCI and F2 enable us to identify the right community structures for both the real world networks and the simulated benchmark network. Evaluation based on the normalized mutual information (NMI) suggests that our community detection method with a greedy algorithm based on LCI and F2 performs superior to many other methods. Therefore, the method we proposed in this paper is potentially noteworthy.