18,964 research outputs found
Decoding communities in networks
According to a recent information-theoretical proposal, the problem of
defining and identifying communities in networks can be interpreted as a
classical communication task over a noisy channel: memberships of nodes are
information bits erased by the channel, edges and non-edges in the network are
parity bits introduced by the encoder but degraded through the channel, and a
community identification algorithm is a decoder. The interpretation is
perfectly equivalent to the one at the basis of well-known statistical
inference algorithms for community detection. The only difference in the
interpretation is that a noisy channel replaces a stochastic network model.
However, the different perspective gives the opportunity to take advantage of
the rich set of tools of coding theory to generate novel insights on the
problem of community detection. In this paper, we illustrate two main
applications of standard coding-theoretical methods to community detection.
First, we leverage a state-of-the-art decoding technique to generate a family
of quasi-optimal community detection algorithms. Second and more important, we
show that the Shannon's noisy-channel coding theorem can be invoked to
establish a lower bound, here named as decodability bound, for the maximum
amount of noise tolerable by an ideal decoder to achieve perfect detection of
communities. When computed for well-established synthetic benchmarks, the
decodability bound explains accurately the performance achieved by the best
community detection algorithms existing on the market, telling us that only
little room for their improvement is still potentially left.Comment: 9 pages, 5 figures + Appendi
Local Algorithms for Block Models with Side Information
There has been a recent interest in understanding the power of local
algorithms for optimization and inference problems on sparse graphs. Gamarnik
and Sudan (2014) showed that local algorithms are weaker than global algorithms
for finding large independent sets in sparse random regular graphs. Montanari
(2015) showed that local algorithms are suboptimal for finding a community with
high connectivity in the sparse Erd\H{o}s-R\'enyi random graphs. For the
symmetric planted partition problem (also named community detection for the
block models) on sparse graphs, a simple observation is that local algorithms
cannot have non-trivial performance.
In this work we consider the effect of side information on local algorithms
for community detection under the binary symmetric stochastic block model. In
the block model with side information each of the vertices is labeled
or independently and uniformly at random; each pair of vertices is
connected independently with probability if both of them have the same
label or otherwise. The goal is to estimate the underlying vertex
labeling given 1) the graph structure and 2) side information in the form of a
vertex labeling positively correlated with the true one. Assuming that the
ratio between in and out degree is and the average degree , we characterize three different regimes under which a
local algorithm, namely, belief propagation run on the local neighborhoods,
maximizes the expected fraction of vertices labeled correctly. Thus, in
contrast to the case of symmetric block models without side information, we
show that local algorithms can achieve optimal performance for the block model
with side information.Comment: Due to the limitation "The abstract field cannot be longer than 1,920
characters", the abstract here is shorter than that in the PDF fil
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