4,184 research outputs found
Multi-scale Modularity in Complex Networks
We focus on the detection of communities in multi-scale networks, namely
networks made of different levels of organization and in which modules exist at
different scales. It is first shown that methods based on modularity are not
appropriate to uncover modules in empirical networks, mainly because modularity
optimization has an intrinsic bias towards partitions having a characteristic
number of modules which might not be compatible with the modular organization
of the system. We argue for the use of more flexible quality functions
incorporating a resolution parameter that allows us to reveal the natural
scales of the system. Different types of multi-resolution quality functions are
described and unified by looking at the partitioning problem from a dynamical
viewpoint. Finally, significant values of the resolution parameter are selected
by using complementary measures of robustness of the uncovered partitions. The
methods are illustrated on a benchmark and an empirical network.Comment: 8 pages, 3 figure
Detecting hierarchical and overlapping network communities using locally optimal modularity changes
Agglomerative clustering is a well established strategy for identifying
communities in networks. Communities are successively merged into larger
communities, coarsening a network of actors into a more manageable network of
communities. The order in which merges should occur is not in general clear,
necessitating heuristics for selecting pairs of communities to merge. We
describe a hierarchical clustering algorithm based on a local optimality
property. For each edge in the network, we associate the modularity change for
merging the communities it links. For each community vertex, we call the
preferred edge that edge for which the modularity change is maximal. When an
edge is preferred by both vertices that it links, it appears to be the optimal
choice from the local viewpoint. We use the locally optimal edges to define the
algorithm: simultaneously merge all pairs of communities that are connected by
locally optimal edges that would increase the modularity, redetermining the
locally optimal edges after each step and continuing so long as the modularity
can be further increased. We apply the algorithm to model and empirical
networks, demonstrating that it can efficiently produce high-quality community
solutions. We relate the performance and implementation details to the
structure of the resulting community hierarchies. We additionally consider a
complementary local clustering algorithm, describing how to identify
overlapping communities based on the local optimality condition.Comment: 10 pages; 4 tables, 3 figure
Batch kernel SOM and related Laplacian methods for social network analysis
Large graphs are natural mathematical models for describing the structure of
the data in a wide variety of fields, such as web mining, social networks,
information retrieval, biological networks, etc. For all these applications,
automatic tools are required to get a synthetic view of the graph and to reach
a good understanding of the underlying problem. In particular, discovering
groups of tightly connected vertices and understanding the relations between
those groups is very important in practice. This paper shows how a kernel
version of the batch Self Organizing Map can be used to achieve these goals via
kernels derived from the Laplacian matrix of the graph, especially when it is
used in conjunction with more classical methods based on the spectral analysis
of the graph. The proposed method is used to explore the structure of a
medieval social network modeled through a weighted graph that has been directly
built from a large corpus of agrarian contracts
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