Modularity of regular and treelike graphs

Clustering algorithms for large networks typically use modularity values to test which partitions of the vertex set better represent structure in the data. The modularity of a graph is the maximum modularity of a partition. We consider the modularity of two kinds of graphs. For $r$-regular graphs with a given number of vertices, we investigate the minimum possible modularity, the typical modularity, and the maximum possible modularity. In particular, we see that for random cubic graphs the modularity is usually in the interval $(0.666, 0.804)$, and for random $r$-regular graphs with large $r$ it usually is of order $1/\sqrt{r}$. These results help to establish baselines for statistical tests on regular graphs. The modularity of cycles and low degree trees is known to be close to 1: we extend these results to `treelike' graphs, where the product of treewidth and maximum degree is much less than the number of edges. This yields for example the (deterministic) lower bound $0.666$ mentioned above on the modularity of random cubic graphs.Comment: 25 page

Communities and bottlenecks: Trees and treelike networks have high modularity

Much effort has gone into understanding the modular nature of complex networks. Communities, also known as clusters or modules, are typically considered to be densely interconnected groups of nodes that are only sparsely connected to other groups in the network. Discovering high quality communities is a difficult and important problem in a number of areas. The most popular approach is the objective function known as modularity, used both to discover communities and to measure their strength. To understand the modular structure of networks it is then crucial to know how such functions evaluate different topologies, what features they account for, and what implicit assumptions they may make. We show that trees and treelike networks can have unexpectedly and often arbitrarily high values of modularity. This is surprising since trees are maximally sparse connected graphs and are not typically considered to possess modular structure, yet the nonlocal null model used by modularity assigns low probabilities, and thus high significance, to the densities of these sparse tree communities. We further study the practical performance of popular methods on model trees and on a genealogical data set and find that the discovered communities also have very high modularity, often approaching its maximum value. Statistical tests reveal the communities in trees to be significant, in contrast with known results for partitions of sparse, random graphs.Comment: 9 pages, 5 figure

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

Spectral redemption: clustering sparse networks

Spectral algorithms are classic approaches to clustering and community detection in networks. However, for sparse networks the standard versions of these algorithms are suboptimal, in some cases completely failing to detect communities even when other algorithms such as belief propagation can do so. Here we introduce a new class of spectral algorithms based on a non-backtracking walk on the directed edges of the graph. The spectrum of this operator is much better-behaved than that of the adjacency matrix or other commonly used matrices, maintaining a strong separation between the bulk eigenvalues and the eigenvalues relevant to community structure even in the sparse case. We show that our algorithm is optimal for graphs generated by the stochastic block model, detecting communities all the way down to the theoretical limit. We also show the spectrum of the non-backtracking operator for some real-world networks, illustrating its advantages over traditional spectral clustering.Comment: 11 pages, 6 figures. Clarified to what extent our claims are rigorous, and to what extent they are conjectures; also added an interpretation of the eigenvectors of the 2n-dimensional version of the non-backtracking matri

Modularity of minor-free graphs

We prove that a class of graphs with an excluded minor and with the maximum degree sublinear in the number of edges is maximally modular, that is, modularity tends to 1 as the number of edges tends to infinity.Comment: 7 pages, 1 figur

The parameterised complexity of computing the maximum modularity of a graph

The maximum modularity of a graph is a parameter widely used to describe the level of clustering or community structure in a network. Determining the maximum modularity of a graph is known to be NP-complete in general, and in practice a range of heuristics are used to construct partitions of the vertex-set which give lower bounds on the maximum modularity but without any guarantee on how close these bounds are to the true maximum. In this paper we investigate the parameterised complexity of determining the maximum modularity with respect to various standard structural parameterisations of the input graph G. We show that the problem belongs to FPT when parameterised by the size of a minimum vertex cover for G, and is solvable in polynomial time whenever the treewidth or max leaf number of G is bounded by some fixed constant; we also obtain an FPT algorithm, parameterised by treewidth, to compute any constant-factor approximation to the maximum modularity. On the other hand we show that the problem is W[1]-hard (and hence unlikely to admit an FPT algorithm) when parameterised simultaneously by pathwidth and the size of a minimum feedback vertex set

On the modularity of 3-regular random graphs and random graphs with given degree sequences

The modularity of a graph is a parameter introduced by Newman and Girvan measuring its community structure; the higher its value (between $0$ and $1$), the more clustered a graph is. In this paper we show that the modularity of a random $3-$regular graph is at least $0.667026$ asymptotically almost surely (a.a.s.), thereby proving a conjecture of McDiarmid and Skerman stating that a random $3-$regular graph has modularity strictly larger than $\frac{2}{3}$ a.a.s. We also improve the upper bound given therein by showing that the modularity of such a graph is a.a.s. at most $0.789998$. For a uniformly chosen graph $G_n$ over a given bounded degree sequence with average degree $d(G_n)$ and with $|CC(G_n)|$ many connected components, we distinguish two regimes with respect to the existence of a giant component. In more detail, we precisely compute the second term of the modularity in the subcritical regime. In the supercritical regime, we further prove that there is $\varepsilon > 0$ depending on the degree sequence, for which the modularity is a.a.s. at least \begin{equation*} \dfrac{2\left(1 - \mu\right)}{d(G_n)}+\varepsilon, \end{equation*} where $\mu$ is the asymptotically almost sure limit of $\dfrac{|CC(G_n)|}{n}$.Comment: 41 page

Determinism and boundedness of self-assembling structures.

Self-assembly processes are widespread in nature and lie at the heart of many biological and physical phenomena. The characteristics of self-assembly building blocks determine the structures that they form. Two crucial properties are the determinism and boundedness of the self-assembly. The former tells us whether the same set of building blocks always generates the same structure, and the latter whether it grows indefinitely. These properties are highly relevant in the context of protein structures, as the difference between deterministic protein self-assembly and nondeterministic protein aggregation is central to a number of diseases. Here we introduce a graph theoretical approach that can determine the determinism and boundedness for several geometries and dimensionalities of self-assembly more accurately and quickly than conventional methods. We apply this methodology to a previously studied lattice self-assembly model and discuss generalizations to a wide range of other self-assembling systems

Critical phenomena in complex networks

The combination of the compactness of networks, featuring small diameters, and their complex architectures results in a variety of critical effects dramatically different from those in cooperative systems on lattices. In the last few years, researchers have made important steps toward understanding the qualitatively new critical phenomena in complex networks. We review the results, concepts, and methods of this rapidly developing field. Here we mostly consider two closely related classes of these critical phenomena, namely structural phase transitions in the network architectures and transitions in cooperative models on networks as substrates. We also discuss systems where a network and interacting agents on it influence each other. We overview a wide range of critical phenomena in equilibrium and growing networks including the birth of the giant connected component, percolation, k-core percolation, phenomena near epidemic thresholds, condensation transitions, critical phenomena in spin models placed on networks, synchronization, and self-organized criticality effects in interacting systems on networks. We also discuss strong finite size effects in these systems and highlight open problems and perspectives.Comment: Review article, 79 pages, 43 figures, 1 table, 508 references, extende