Community Detection in Signed Networks: an Error-Correcting Code Approach

In this paper, we consider the community detection problem in signed networks, where there are two types of edges: positive edges (friends) and negative edges (enemies). One renowned theorem of signed networks, known as Harary's theorem, states that structurally balanced signed networks are clusterable. By viewing each cycle in a signed network as a parity-check constraint, we show that the community detection problem in a signed network with two communities is equivalent to the decoding problem for a parity-check code. We also show how one can use two renowned decoding algorithms in error- correcting codes for community detection in signed networks: the bit-flipping algorithm, and the belief propagation algorithm. In addition to these two algorithms, we also propose a new community detection algorithm, called the Hamming distance algorithm, that performs community detection by finding a codeword that minimizes the Hamming distance. We compare the performance of these three algorithms by conducting various experiments with known ground truth. Our experimental results show that our Hamming distance algorithm outperforms the other two

Symbolic Stochastic Chase Decoding of Reed-Solomon and BCH Codes

This paper proposes the Symbolic-Stochastic Chase Decoding Algorithm (S-SCA) for the Reed-Solomon (RS) and BCH codes. By efficient usage of void space between constellation points for $q$-ary modulations and using soft information at the input of the decoder, the S-SCA is capable of outperforming conventional Symbolic-Chase algorithm (S-CA) with less computational cost. Since the S-SCA starts with the randomized generation of likely test-vectors, it reduces the complexity to polynomial order and also it does not need to find the least reliable symbols to generate test-vectors. Our simulation results show that by increasing the number of test-vectors, the performance of the algorithm can approach the ML bound. The S-SCA($1K$) provides near $2$ dB gain in comparison with S-CA($1K$) for $(31, 25)$ RS code using $32$-QAM. Furthermore, the algorithm provides near $3$ dB further gain with $1K$ iteration compared with S-CA($65K$) when $(255, 239)$ RS code is used in an AWGN channel. For the Rayleigh fading channel and the same code, the algorithm provides more that $5$ dB gain. Also for $(63, 57)$ BCH codes and $8$-PSK modulation the proposed algorithm provides $3$dB gain with less complexity. This decoder is Soft-Input Soft-Output (SISO) decoder and is highly attractive in low power applications. Finally, the Symbolic-Search Bitwise-Transmission Stochastic Chase Algorithm (SSBT-SCA) was introduced for RS codes over BPSK transmission that is capable of generating symbolic test-vectors that reduce complexity and mitigate burst errors