6,299 research outputs found
Modeling sequences and temporal networks with dynamic community structures
In evolving complex systems such as air traffic and social organizations,
collective effects emerge from their many components' dynamic interactions.
While the dynamic interactions can be represented by temporal networks with
nodes and links that change over time, they remain highly complex. It is
therefore often necessary to use methods that extract the temporal networks'
large-scale dynamic community structure. However, such methods are subject to
overfitting or suffer from effects of arbitrary, a priori imposed timescales,
which should instead be extracted from data. Here we simultaneously address
both problems and develop a principled data-driven method that determines
relevant timescales and identifies patterns of dynamics that take place on
networks as well as shape the networks themselves. We base our method on an
arbitrary-order Markov chain model with community structure, and develop a
nonparametric Bayesian inference framework that identifies the simplest such
model that can explain temporal interaction data.Comment: 15 Pages, 6 figures, 2 table
A network approach to topic models
One of the main computational and scientific challenges in the modern age is
to extract useful information from unstructured texts. Topic models are one
popular machine-learning approach which infers the latent topical structure of
a collection of documents. Despite their success --- in particular of its most
widely used variant called Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) --- and numerous
applications in sociology, history, and linguistics, topic models are known to
suffer from severe conceptual and practical problems, e.g. a lack of
justification for the Bayesian priors, discrepancies with statistical
properties of real texts, and the inability to properly choose the number of
topics. Here we obtain a fresh view on the problem of identifying topical
structures by relating it to the problem of finding communities in complex
networks. This is achieved by representing text corpora as bipartite networks
of documents and words. By adapting existing community-detection methods --
using a stochastic block model (SBM) with non-parametric priors -- we obtain a
more versatile and principled framework for topic modeling (e.g., it
automatically detects the number of topics and hierarchically clusters both the
words and documents). The analysis of artificial and real corpora demonstrates
that our SBM approach leads to better topic models than LDA in terms of
statistical model selection. More importantly, our work shows how to formally
relate methods from community detection and topic modeling, opening the
possibility of cross-fertilization between these two fields.Comment: 22 pages, 10 figures, code available at https://topsbm.github.io
Computational Sociolinguistics: A Survey
Language is a social phenomenon and variation is inherent to its social
nature. Recently, there has been a surge of interest within the computational
linguistics (CL) community in the social dimension of language. In this article
we present a survey of the emerging field of "Computational Sociolinguistics"
that reflects this increased interest. We aim to provide a comprehensive
overview of CL research on sociolinguistic themes, featuring topics such as the
relation between language and social identity, language use in social
interaction and multilingual communication. Moreover, we demonstrate the
potential for synergy between the research communities involved, by showing how
the large-scale data-driven methods that are widely used in CL can complement
existing sociolinguistic studies, and how sociolinguistics can inform and
challenge the methods and assumptions employed in CL studies. We hope to convey
the possible benefits of a closer collaboration between the two communities and
conclude with a discussion of open challenges.Comment: To appear in Computational Linguistics. Accepted for publication:
18th February, 201
Bayesian stochastic blockmodeling
This chapter provides a self-contained introduction to the use of Bayesian
inference to extract large-scale modular structures from network data, based on
the stochastic blockmodel (SBM), as well as its degree-corrected and
overlapping generalizations. We focus on nonparametric formulations that allow
their inference in a manner that prevents overfitting, and enables model
selection. We discuss aspects of the choice of priors, in particular how to
avoid underfitting via increased Bayesian hierarchies, and we contrast the task
of sampling network partitions from the posterior distribution with finding the
single point estimate that maximizes it, while describing efficient algorithms
to perform either one. We also show how inferring the SBM can be used to
predict missing and spurious links, and shed light on the fundamental
limitations of the detectability of modular structures in networks.Comment: 44 pages, 16 figures. Code is freely available as part of graph-tool
at https://graph-tool.skewed.de . See also the HOWTO at
https://graph-tool.skewed.de/static/doc/demos/inference/inference.htm
- …