Community detection is an important task in network analysis, in which we aim to learn a network partition that groups together vertices with similar community-level connectivity patterns. By finding such groups of vertices with similar structural ro
les, we extract a compact representation of the networks large-scale structure, which can facilitate its scientific interpretation and the prediction of unknown or future interactions. Popular approaches, including the stochastic block model, assume edges are unweighted, which limits their utility by throwing away potentially useful information. We introduce the `weighted stochastic block model (WSBM), which generalizes the stochastic block model to networks with edge weights drawn from any exponential family distribution. This model learns from both the presence and weight of edges, allowing it to discover structure that would otherwise be hidden when weights are discarded or thresholded. We describe a Bayesian variational algorithm for efficiently approximating this models posterior distribution over latent block structures. We then evaluate the WSBMs performance on both edge-existence and edge-weight prediction tasks for a set of real-world weighted networks. In all cases, the WSBM performs as well or better than the best alternatives on these tasks.
