4 research outputs found
An algebraic analysis of the graph modularity
One of the most relevant tasks in network analysis is the detection of
community structures, or clustering. Most popular techniques for community
detection are based on the maximization of a quality function called
modularity, which in turn is based upon particular quadratic forms associated
to a real symmetric modularity matrix , defined in terms of the adjacency
matrix and a rank one null model matrix. That matrix could be posed inside the
set of relevant matrices involved in graph theory, alongside adjacency,
incidence and Laplacian matrices. This is the reason we propose a graph
analysis based on the algebraic and spectral properties of such matrix. In
particular, we propose a nodal domain theorem for the eigenvectors of ; we
point out several relations occurring between graph's communities and
nonnegative eigenvalues of ; and we derive a Cheeger-type inequality for the
graph optimal modularity
Community detection in networks via nonlinear modularity eigenvectors
Revealing a community structure in a network or dataset is a central problem
arising in many scientific areas. The modularity function is an established
measure quantifying the quality of a community, being identified as a set of
nodes having high modularity. In our terminology, a set of nodes with positive
modularity is called a \textit{module} and a set that maximizes is thus
called \textit{leading module}. Finding a leading module in a network is an
important task, however the dimension of real-world problems makes the
maximization of unfeasible. This poses the need of approximation techniques
which are typically based on a linear relaxation of , induced by the
spectrum of the modularity matrix . In this work we propose a nonlinear
relaxation which is instead based on the spectrum of a nonlinear modularity
operator . We show that extremal eigenvalues of
provide an exact relaxation of the modularity measure , however at the price
of being more challenging to be computed than those of . Thus we extend the
work made on nonlinear Laplacians, by proposing a computational scheme, named
\textit{generalized RatioDCA}, to address such extremal eigenvalues. We show
monotonic ascent and convergence of the method. We finally apply the new method
to several synthetic and real-world data sets, showing both effectiveness of
the model and performance of the method