No Arabic abstract
Complex systems, abstractly represented as networks, are ubiquitous in everyday life. Analyzing and understanding these systems requires, among others, tools for community detection. As no single best community detection algorithm can exist, robustness across a wide variety of problem settings is desirable. In this work, we present Synwalk, a random walk-based community detection method. Synwalk builds upon a solid theoretical basis and detects communities by synthesizing the random walk induced by the given network from a class of candidate random walks. We thoroughly validate the effectiveness of our approach on synthetic and empirical networks, respectively, and compare Synwalks performance with the performance of Infomap and Walktrap. Our results indicate that Synwalk performs robustly on networks with varying mixing parameters and degree distributions. We outperform Infomap on networks with high mixing parameter, and Infomap and Walktrap on networks with many small communities and low average degree. Our work has a potential to inspire further development of community detection via synthesis of random walks and we provide concrete ideas for future research.
We develop a Bayesian hierarchical model to identify communities in networks for which we do not observe the edges directly, but instead observe a series of interdependent signals for each of the nodes. Fitting the model provides an end-to-end community detection algorithm that does not extract information as a sequence of point estimates but propagates uncertainties from the raw data to the community labels. Our approach naturally supports multiscale community detection as well as the selection of an optimal scale using model comparison. We study the properties of the algorithm using synthetic data and apply it to daily returns of constituents of the S&P100 index as well as climate data from US cities.
We study the community detection problem on a Gaussian mixture model, in which vertices are divided into $kgeq 2$ distinct communities. The major difference in our model is that the intensities for Gaussian perturbations are different for different entries in the observation matrix, and we do not assume that every community has the same number of vertices. We explicitly find the threshold for the exact recovery of the maximum likelihood estimation. Applications include the community detection on hypergraphs.
Community detections for large-scale real world networks have been more popular in social analytics. In particular, dynamically growing network analyses become important to find long-term trends and detect anomalies. In order to analyze such networks, we need to obtain many snapshots and apply same analytic methods to them. However, it is inefficient to extract communities from these whole newly generated networks with little differences every time, and then it is impossible to follow the network growths in the real time. We proposed an incremental community detection algorithm for high-volume graph streams. It is based on the top of a well-known batch-oriented algorithm named DEMON[1]. We also evaluated performance and precisions of our proposed incremental algorithm with real-world big networks with up to 410,236 vertices and 2,439,437 edges and computed in less than one second to detect communities in an incremental fashion - which achieves up to 107 times faster than the original algorithm without sacrificing accuracies.
Across many scientific domains, there is a common need to automatically extract a simplified view or coarse-graining of how a complex systems components interact. This general task is called community detection in networks and is analogous to searching for clusters in independent vector data. It is common to evaluate the performance of community detection algorithms by their ability to find so-called ground truth communities. This works well in synthetic networks with planted communities because such networks links are formed explicitly based on those known communities. However, there are no planted communities in real world networks. Instead, it is standard practice to treat some observed discrete-valued node attributes, or metadata, as ground truth. Here, we show that metadata are not the same as ground truth, and that treating them as such induces severe theoretical and practical problems. We prove that no algorithm can uniquely solve community detection, and we prove a general No Free Lunch theorem for community detection, which implies that there can be no algorithm that is optimal for all possible community detection tasks. However, community detection remains a powerful tool and node metadata still have value so a careful exploration of their relationship with network structure can yield insights of genuine worth. We illustrate this point by introducing two statistical techniques that can quantify the relationship between metadata and community structure for a broad class of models. We demonstrate these techniques using both synthetic and real-world networks, and for multiple types of metadata and community structure.
Community detection is a key task to further understand the function and the structure of complex networks. Therefore, a strategy used to assess this task must be able to avoid biased and incorrect results that might invalidate further analyses or applications that rely on such communities. Two widely used strategies to assess this task are generally known as structural and functional. The structural strategy basically consists in detecting and assessing such communities by using multiple methods and structural metrics. On the other hand, the functional strategy might be used when ground truth data are available to assess the detected communities. However, the evaluation of communities based on such strategies is usually done in experimental configurations that are largely susceptible to biases, a situation that is inherent to algorithms, metrics and network data used in this task. Furthermore, such strategies are not systematically combined in a way that allows for the identification and mitigation of bias in the algorithms, metrics or network data to converge into more consistent results. In this context, the main contribution of this article is an approach that supports a robust quality evaluation when detecting communities in real-world networks. In our approach, we measure the quality of a community by applying the structural and functional strategies, and the combination of both, to obtain different pieces of evidence. Then, we consider the divergences and the consensus among the pieces of evidence to identify and overcome possible sources of bias in community detection algorithms, evaluation metrics, and network data. Experiments conducted with several real and synthetic networks provided results that show the effectiveness of our approach to obtain more consistent conclusions about the quality of the detected communities.