Network community detection via iterative edge removal in a flocking-like system

We present a network community-detection technique based on properties that emerge from a nature-inspired system of aligning particles. Initially, each vertex is assigned a random-direction unit vector. A nonlinear dynamic law is established so that neighboring vertices try to become aligned with each other. After some time, the system stops and edges that connect the least-aligned pairs of vertices are removed. Then the evolution starts over without the removed edges, and after enough number of removal rounds, each community becomes a connected component. The proposed approach is evaluated using widely-accepted benchmarks and real-world networks. Experimental results reveal that the method is robust and excels on a wide variety of networks. Moreover, for large sparse networks, the edge-removal process runs in quasilinear time, which enables application in large-scale networks

Deep Learning for Link Prediction in Dynamic Networks using Weak Estimators

Link prediction is the task of evaluating the probability that an edge exists in a network, and it has useful applications in many domains. Traditional approaches rely on measuring the similarity between two nodes in a static context. Recent research has focused on extending link prediction to a dynamic setting, predicting the creation and destruction of links in networks that evolve over time. Though a difficult task, the employment of deep learning techniques have shown to make notable improvements to the accuracy of predictions. To this end, we propose the novel application of weak estimators in addition to the utilization of traditional similarity metrics to inexpensively build an effective feature vector for a deep neural network. Weak estimators have been used in a variety of machine learning algorithms to improve model accuracy, owing to their capacity to estimate changing probabilities in dynamic systems. Experiments indicate that our approach results in increased prediction accuracy on several real-world dynamic networks

DHLP 1&2: Giraph based distributed label propagation algorithms on heterogeneous drug-related networks

Background and Objective: Heterogeneous complex networks are large graphs consisting of different types of nodes and edges. The knowledge extraction from these networks is complicated. Moreover, the scale of these networks is steadily increasing. Thus, scalable methods are required. Methods: In this paper, two distributed label propagation algorithms for heterogeneous networks, namely DHLP-1 and DHLP-2 have been introduced. Biological networks are one type of the heterogeneous complex networks. As a case study, we have measured the efficiency of our proposed DHLP-1 and DHLP-2 algorithms on a biological network consisting of drugs, diseases, and targets. The subject we have studied in this network is drug repositioning but our algorithms can be used as general methods for heterogeneous networks other than the biological network. Results: We compared the proposed algorithms with similar non-distributed versions of them namely MINProp and Heter-LP. The experiments revealed the good performance of the algorithms in terms of running time and accuracy.Comment: Source code available for Apache Giraph on Hadoo

Approximate Closest Community Search in Networks

Recently, there has been significant interest in the study of the community search problem in social and information networks: given one or more query nodes, find densely connected communities containing the query nodes. However, most existing studies do not address the "free rider" issue, that is, nodes far away from query nodes and irrelevant to them are included in the detected community. Some state-of-the-art models have attempted to address this issue, but not only are their formulated problems NP-hard, they do not admit any approximations without restrictive assumptions, which may not always hold in practice. In this paper, given an undirected graph G and a set of query nodes Q, we study community search using the k-truss based community model. We formulate our problem of finding a closest truss community (CTC), as finding a connected k-truss subgraph with the largest k that contains Q, and has the minimum diameter among such subgraphs. We prove this problem is NP-hard. Furthermore, it is NP-hard to approximate the problem within a factor $(2-\varepsilon)$, for any $\varepsilon >0$. However, we develop a greedy algorithmic framework, which first finds a CTC containing Q, and then iteratively removes the furthest nodes from Q, from the graph. The method achieves 2-approximation to the optimal solution. To further improve the efficiency, we make use of a compact truss index and develop efficient algorithms for k-truss identification and maintenance as nodes get eliminated. In addition, using bulk deletion optimization and local exploration strategies, we propose two more efficient algorithms. One of them trades some approximation quality for efficiency while the other is a very efficient heuristic. Extensive experiments on 6 real-world networks show the effectiveness and efficiency of our community model and search algorithms

A generalised significance test for individual communities in networks

Many empirical networks have community structure, in which nodes are densely interconnected within each community (i.e., a group of nodes) and sparsely across different communities. Like other local and meso-scale structure of networks, communities are generally heterogeneous in various aspects such as the size, density of edges, connectivity to other communities and significance. In the present study, we propose a method to statistically test the significance of individual communities in a given network. Compared to the previous methods, the present algorithm is unique in that it accepts different community-detection algorithms and the corresponding quality function for single communities. The present method requires that a quality of each community can be quantified and that community detection is performed as optimisation of such a quality function summed over the communities. Various community detection algorithms including modularity maximisation and graph partitioning meet this criterion. Our method estimates a distribution of the quality function for randomised networks to calculate a likelihood of each community in the given network. We illustrate our algorithm by synthetic and empirical networks.Comment: 20 pages, 4 figures and 4 table