253,561 research outputs found
Different approaches to community detection
A precise definition of what constitutes a community in networks has remained
elusive. Consequently, network scientists have compared community detection
algorithms on benchmark networks with a particular form of community structure
and classified them based on the mathematical techniques they employ. However,
this comparison can be misleading because apparent similarities in their
mathematical machinery can disguise different reasons for why we would want to
employ community detection in the first place. Here we provide a focused review
of these different motivations that underpin community detection. This
problem-driven classification is useful in applied network science, where it is
important to select an appropriate algorithm for the given purpose. Moreover,
highlighting the different approaches to community detection also delineates
the many lines of research and points out open directions and avenues for
future research.Comment: 14 pages, 2 figures. Written as a chapter for forthcoming Advances in
network clustering and blockmodeling, and based on an extended version of The
many facets of community detection in complex networks, Appl. Netw. Sci. 2: 4
(2017) by the same author
Evaluating Overfit and Underfit in Models of Network Community Structure
A common data mining task on networks is community detection, which seeks an
unsupervised decomposition of a network into structural groups based on
statistical regularities in the network's connectivity. Although many methods
exist, the No Free Lunch theorem for community detection implies that each
makes some kind of tradeoff, and no algorithm can be optimal on all inputs.
Thus, different algorithms will over or underfit on different inputs, finding
more, fewer, or just different communities than is optimal, and evaluation
methods that use a metadata partition as a ground truth will produce misleading
conclusions about general accuracy. Here, we present a broad evaluation of over
and underfitting in community detection, comparing the behavior of 16
state-of-the-art community detection algorithms on a novel and structurally
diverse corpus of 406 real-world networks. We find that (i) algorithms vary
widely both in the number of communities they find and in their corresponding
composition, given the same input, (ii) algorithms can be clustered into
distinct high-level groups based on similarities of their outputs on real-world
networks, and (iii) these differences induce wide variation in accuracy on link
prediction and link description tasks. We introduce a new diagnostic for
evaluating overfitting and underfitting in practice, and use it to roughly
divide community detection methods into general and specialized learning
algorithms. Across methods and inputs, Bayesian techniques based on the
stochastic block model and a minimum description length approach to
regularization represent the best general learning approach, but can be
outperformed under specific circumstances. These results introduce both a
theoretically principled approach to evaluate over and underfitting in models
of network community structure and a realistic benchmark by which new methods
may be evaluated and compared.Comment: 22 pages, 13 figures, 3 table
How is a data-driven approach better than random choice in label space division for multi-label classification?
We propose using five data-driven community detection approaches from social
networks to partition the label space for the task of multi-label
classification as an alternative to random partitioning into equal subsets as
performed by RAkELd: modularity-maximizing fastgreedy and leading eigenvector,
infomap, walktrap and label propagation algorithms. We construct a label
co-occurence graph (both weighted an unweighted versions) based on training
data and perform community detection to partition the label set. We include
Binary Relevance and Label Powerset classification methods for comparison. We
use gini-index based Decision Trees as the base classifier. We compare educated
approaches to label space divisions against random baselines on 12 benchmark
data sets over five evaluation measures. We show that in almost all cases seven
educated guess approaches are more likely to outperform RAkELd than otherwise
in all measures, but Hamming Loss. We show that fastgreedy and walktrap
community detection methods on weighted label co-occurence graphs are 85-92%
more likely to yield better F1 scores than random partitioning. Infomap on the
unweighted label co-occurence graphs is on average 90% of the times better than
random paritioning in terms of Subset Accuracy and 89% when it comes to Jaccard
similarity. Weighted fastgreedy is better on average than RAkELd when it comes
to Hamming Loss
Community detection by label propagation with compression of flow
The label propagation algorithm (LPA) has been proved to be a fast and
effective method for detecting communities in large complex networks. However,
its performance is subject to the non-stable and trivial solutions of the
problem. In this paper, we propose a modified label propagation algorithm LPAf
to efficiently detect community structures in networks. Instead of the majority
voting rule of the basic LPA, LPAf updates the label of a node by considering
the compression of a description of random walks on a network. A multi-step
greedy agglomerative strategy is employed to enable LPAf to escape the local
optimum. Furthermore, an incomplete update condition is also adopted to speed
up the convergence. Experimental results on both synthetic and real-world
networks confirm the effectiveness of our algorithm
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