Detecting network communities beyond assortativity-related attributes

In network science, assortativity refers to the tendency of links to exist between nodes with similar attributes. In social networks, for example, links tend to exist between individuals of similar age, nationality, location, race, income, educational level, religious belief, and language. Thus, various attributes jointly affect the network topology. An interesting problem is to detect community structure beyond some specific assortativity-related attributes $rho$, i.e., to take out the effect of $rho$ on network topology and reveal the hidden community structure which are due to other attributes. An approach to this problem is to redefine the null model of the modularity measure, so as to simulate the effect of $rho$ on network topology. However, a challenge is that we do not know to what extent the network topology is affected by $rho$ and by other attributes. In this paper, we propose Dist-Modularity which allows us to freely choose any suitable function to simulate the effect of $rho$. Such freedom can help us probe the effect of $rho$ and detect the hidden communities which are due to other attributes. We test the effectiveness of Dist-Modularity on synthetic benchmarks and two real-world networks.

A framework for community detection in heterogeneous multi-relational networks

There has been a surge of interest in community detection in homogeneous single-relational networks which contain only one type of nodes and edges. However, many real-world systems are naturally described as heterogeneous multi-relational networks which contain multiple types of nodes and edges. In this paper, we propose a new method for detecting communities in such networks. Our method is based on optimizing the composite modularity, which is a new modularity proposed for evaluating partitions of a heterogeneous multi-relational network into communities. Our method is parameter-free, scalable, and suitable for various networks with general structure. We demonstrate that it outperforms the state-of-the-art techniques in detecting pre-planted communities in synthetic networks. Applied to a real-world Digg network, it successfully detects meaningful communities.