An algebraic analysis of the graph modularity

One of the most relevant tasks in network analysis is the detection of community structures, or clustering. Most popular techniques for community detection are based on the maximization of a quality function called modularity, which in turn is based upon particular quadratic forms associated to a real symmetric modularity matrix $M$, defined in terms of the adjacency matrix and a rank one null model matrix. That matrix could be posed inside the set of relevant matrices involved in graph theory, alongside adjacency, incidence and Laplacian matrices. This is the reason we propose a graph analysis based on the algebraic and spectral properties of such matrix. In particular, we propose a nodal domain theorem for the eigenvectors of $M$; we point out several relations occurring between graph's communities and nonnegative eigenvalues of $M$; and we derive a Cheeger-type inequality for the graph optimal modularity

A modularity based spectral method for simultaneous community and anti-community detection

In a graph or complex network, communities and anti-communities are node sets whose modularity attains extremely large values, positive and negative, respectively. We consider the simultaneous detection of communities and anti-communities, by looking at spectral methods based on various matrix-based definitions of the modularity of a vertex set. Invariant subspaces associated to extreme eigenvalues of these matrices provide indications on the presence of both kinds of modular structure in the network. The localization of the relevant invariant subspaces can be estimated by looking at particular matrix angles based on Frobenius inner products

Generalized modularity matrices

Various modularity matrices appeared in the recent literature on network analysis and algebraic graph theory. Their purpose is to allow writing as quadratic forms certain combinatorial functions appearing in the framework of graph clustering problems. In this paper we put in evidence certain common traits of various modularity matrices and shed light on their spectral properties that are at the basis of various theoretical results and practical spectral-type algorithms for community detection

A nodal domain theorem and a higher-order Cheeger inequality for the graph pp-Laplacian

We consider the nonlinear graph $p$-Laplacian and its set of eigenvalues and associated eigenfunctions of this operator defined by a variational principle. We prove a nodal domain theorem for the graph $p$-Laplacian for any $p\geq 1$. While for $p>1$ the bounds on the number of weak and strong nodal domains are the same as for the linear graph Laplacian ($p=2$), the behavior changes for $p=1$. We show that the bounds are tight for $p\geq 1$ as the bounds are attained by the eigenfunctions of the graph $p$-Laplacian on two graphs. Finally, using the properties of the nodal domains, we prove a higher-order Cheeger inequality for the graph $p$-Laplacian for $p>1$. If the eigenfunction associated to the $k$-th variational eigenvalue of the graph $p$-Laplacian has exactly $k$ strong nodal domains, then the higher order Cheeger inequality becomes tight as $p\rightarrow 1$

The expected adjacency and modularity matrices in the degree corrected stochastic block model

We provide explicit expressions for the eigenvalues andeigenvectors of matrices that can be written as the Hadamard product of a blockpartitioned matrix with constant blocks and a rank one matrix. Such matricesarise as the expected adjacency or modularity matrices in certain random graphmodels that are widely used as benchmarks for community detection algorithms

Community detection in networks via nonlinear modularity eigenvectors

Revealing a community structure in a network or dataset is a central problem arising in many scientific areas. The modularity function $Q$ is an established measure quantifying the quality of a community, being identified as a set of nodes having high modularity. In our terminology, a set of nodes with positive modularity is called a \textit{module} and a set that maximizes $Q$ is thus called \textit{leading module}. Finding a leading module in a network is an important task, however the dimension of real-world problems makes the maximization of $Q$ unfeasible. This poses the need of approximation techniques which are typically based on a linear relaxation of $Q$, induced by the spectrum of the modularity matrix $M$. In this work we propose a nonlinear relaxation which is instead based on the spectrum of a nonlinear modularity operator $\mathcal M$. We show that extremal eigenvalues of $\mathcal M$ provide an exact relaxation of the modularity measure $Q$, however at the price of being more challenging to be computed than those of $M$. Thus we extend the work made on nonlinear Laplacians, by proposing a computational scheme, named \textit{generalized RatioDCA}, to address such extremal eigenvalues. We show monotonic ascent and convergence of the method. We finally apply the new method to several synthetic and real-world data sets, showing both effectiveness of the model and performance of the method