Community detection and stochastic block models: recent developments

The stochastic block model (SBM) is a random graph model with planted clusters. It is widely employed as a canonical model to study clustering and community detection, and provides generally a fertile ground to study the statistical and computational tradeoffs that arise in network and data sciences. This note surveys the recent developments that establish the fundamental limits for community detection in the SBM, both with respect to information-theoretic and computational thresholds, and for various recovery requirements such as exact, partial and weak recovery (a.k.a., detection). The main results discussed are the phase transitions for exact recovery at the Chernoff-Hellinger threshold, the phase transition for weak recovery at the Kesten-Stigum threshold, the optimal distortion-SNR tradeoff for partial recovery, the learning of the SBM parameters and the gap between information-theoretic and computational thresholds. The note also covers some of the algorithms developed in the quest of achieving the limits, in particular two-round algorithms via graph-splitting, semi-definite programming, linearized belief propagation, classical and nonbacktracking spectral methods. A few open problems are also discussed

A supervised approach for intra-/inter-community interaction prediction in dynamic social networks

Due to the growing availability of Internet services in the last decade, the interactions between people became more and more easy to establish. For example, we can have an intercontinental job interview, or we can send real-time multimedia content to any friend of us just owning a smartphone. All this kind of human activities generates digital footprints, that describe a complex, rapidly evolving, network structures. In such dynamic scenario, one of the most challenging tasks involves the prediction of future interactions between couples of actors (i.e., users in online social networks, researchers in collaboration networks). In this paper, we approach such problem by leveraging networks dynamics: to this extent, we propose a supervised learning approach which exploits features computed by time-aware forecasts of topological measures calculated between node pairs. Moreover, since real social networks are generally composed by weakly connected modules, we instantiate the interaction prediction problem in two disjoint applicative scenarios: intra-community and inter-community link prediction. Experimental results on real time-stamped networks show how our approach is able to reach high accuracy. Furthermore, we analyze the performances of our methodology when varying the typologies of features, community discovery algorithms and forecast methods

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

Discovering Patterns in Time-Varying Graphs: A Triclustering Approach

International audienceThis paper introduces a novel technique to track structures in time varying graphs. The method uses a maximum a posteriori approach for adjusting a three-dimensional co-clustering of the source vertices, the destination vertices and the time, to the data under study, in a way that does not require any hyper-parameter tuning. The three dimensions are simultaneously segmented in order to build clusters of source vertices, destination vertices and time segments where the edge distributions across clusters of vertices follow the same evolution over the time segments. The main novelty of this approach lies in that the time segments are directly inferred from the evolution of the edge distribution between the vertices, thus not requiring the user to make any a priori quantization. Experiments conducted on artificial data illustrate the good behavior of the technique, and a study of a real-life data set shows the potential of the proposed approach for exploratory data analysis

A Novel Graph Constructor for Semisupervised Discriminant Analysis: Combined Low-Rank and k

Semisupervised Discriminant Analysis (SDA) is a semisupervised dimensionality reduction algorithm, which can easily resolve the out-of-sample problem. Relative works usually focus on the geometric relationships of data points, which are not obvious, to enhance the performance of SDA. Different from these relative works, the regularized graph construction is researched here, which is important in the graph-based semisupervised learning methods. In this paper, we propose a novel graph for Semisupervised Discriminant Analysis, which is called combined low-rank and k-nearest neighbor (LRKNN) graph. In our LRKNN graph, we map the data to the LR feature space and then the kNN is adopted to satisfy the algorithmic requirements of SDA. Since the low-rank representation can capture the global structure and the k-nearest neighbor algorithm can maximally preserve the local geometrical structure of the data, the LRKNN graph can significantly improve the performance of SDA. Extensive experiments on several real-world databases show that the proposed LRKNN graph is an efficient graph constructor, which can largely outperform other commonly used baselines