Compressing networks with super nodes

Community detection is a commonly used technique for identifying groups in a network based on similarities in connectivity patterns. To facilitate community detection in large networks, we recast the network to be partitioned into a smaller network of 'super nodes', each super node comprising one or more nodes in the original network. To define the seeds of our super nodes, we apply the 'CoreHD' ranking from dismantling and decycling. We test our approach through the analysis of two common methods for community detection: modularity maximization with the Louvain algorithm and maximum likelihood optimization for fitting a stochastic block model. Our results highlight that applying community detection to the compressed network of super nodes is significantly faster while successfully producing partitions that are more aligned with the local network connectivity, more stable across multiple (stochastic) runs within and between community detection algorithms, and overlap well with the results obtained using the full network

A nonuniform popularity-similarity optimization (nPSO) model to efficiently generate realistic complex networks with communities

The hidden metric space behind complex network topologies is a fervid topic in current network science and the hyperbolic space is one of the most studied, because it seems associated to the structural organization of many real complex systems. The Popularity-Similarity-Optimization (PSO) model simulates how random geometric graphs grow in the hyperbolic space, reproducing strong clustering and scale-free degree distribution, however it misses to reproduce an important feature of real complex networks, which is the community organization. The Geometrical-Preferential-Attachment (GPA) model was recently developed to confer to the PSO also a community structure, which is obtained by forcing different angular regions of the hyperbolic disk to have variable level of attractiveness. However, the number and size of the communities cannot be explicitly controlled in the GPA, which is a clear limitation for real applications. Here, we introduce the nonuniform PSO (nPSO) model that, differently from GPA, forces heterogeneous angular node attractiveness by sampling the angular coordinates from a tailored nonuniform probability distribution, for instance a mixture of Gaussians. The nPSO differs from GPA in other three aspects: it allows to explicitly fix the number and size of communities; it allows to tune their mixing property through the network temperature; it is efficient to generate networks with high clustering. After several tests we propose the nPSO as a valid and efficient model to generate networks with communities in the hyperbolic space, which can be adopted as a realistic benchmark for different tasks such as community detection and link prediction

Community detection for correlation matrices

A challenging problem in the study of complex systems is that of resolving, without prior information, the emergent, mesoscopic organization determined by groups of units whose dynamical activity is more strongly correlated internally than with the rest of the system. The existing techniques to filter correlations are not explicitly oriented towards identifying such modules and can suffer from an unavoidable information loss. A promising alternative is that of employing community detection techniques developed in network theory. Unfortunately, this approach has focused predominantly on replacing network data with correlation matrices, a procedure that tends to be intrinsically biased due to its inconsistency with the null hypotheses underlying the existing algorithms. Here we introduce, via a consistent redefinition of null models based on random matrix theory, the appropriate correlation-based counterparts of the most popular community detection techniques. Our methods can filter out both unit-specific noise and system-wide dependencies, and the resulting communities are internally correlated and mutually anti-correlated. We also implement multiresolution and multifrequency approaches revealing hierarchically nested sub-communities with `hard' cores and `soft' peripheries. We apply our techniques to several financial time series and identify mesoscopic groups of stocks which are irreducible to a standard, sectorial taxonomy, detect `soft stocks' that alternate between communities, and discuss implications for portfolio optimization and risk management.Comment: Final version, accepted for publication on PR

Put three and three together: Triangle-driven community detection

Community detection has arisen as one of the most relevant topics in the field of graph data mining due to its applications in many fields such as biology, social networks, or network traffic analysis. Although the existing metrics used to quantify the quality of a community work well in general, under some circumstances, they fail at correctly capturing such notion. The main reason is that these metrics consider the internal community edges as a set, but ignore how these actually connect the vertices of the community. We propose the Weighted Community Clustering (WCC), which is a new community metric that takes the triangle instead of the edge as the minimal structural motif indicating the presence of a strong relation in a graph. We theoretically analyse WCC in depth and formally prove, by means of a set of properties, that the maximization of WCC guarantees communities with cohesion and structure. In addition, we propose Scalable Community Detection (SCD), a community detection algorithm based on WCC, which is designed to be fast and scalable on SMP machines, showing experimentally that WCC correctly captures the concept of community in social networks using real datasets. Finally, using ground-truth data, we show that SCD provides better quality than the best disjoint community detection algorithms of the state of the art while performing faster.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft