6 research outputs found
Simplified Energy Landscape for Modularity Using Total Variation
Networks capture pairwise interactions between entities and are frequently
used in applications such as social networks, food networks, and protein
interaction networks, to name a few. Communities, cohesive groups of nodes,
often form in these applications, and identifying them gives insight into the
overall organization of the network. One common quality function used to
identify community structure is modularity. In Hu et al. [SIAM J. App. Math.,
73(6), 2013], it was shown that modularity optimization is equivalent to
minimizing a particular nonconvex total variation (TV) based functional over a
discrete domain. They solve this problem, assuming the number of communities is
known, using a Merriman, Bence, Osher (MBO) scheme.
We show that modularity optimization is equivalent to minimizing a convex
TV-based functional over a discrete domain, again, assuming the number of
communities is known. Furthermore, we show that modularity has no convex
relaxation satisfying certain natural conditions. We therefore, find a
manageable non-convex approximation using a Ginzburg Landau functional, which
provably converges to the correct energy in the limit of a certain parameter.
We then derive an MBO algorithm with fewer hand-tuned parameters than in Hu et
al. and which is 7 times faster at solving the associated diffusion equation
due to the fact that the underlying discretization is unconditionally stable.
Our numerical tests include a hyperspectral video whose associated graph has
2.9x10^7 edges, which is roughly 37 times larger than was handled in the paper
of Hu et al.Comment: 25 pages, 3 figures, 3 tables, submitted to SIAM J. App. Mat
Total variation based community detection using a nonlinear optimization approach
Maximizing the modularity of a network is a successful tool to identify an
important community of nodes. However, this combinatorial optimization problem
is known to be NP-complete. Inspired by recent nonlinear modularity eigenvector
approaches, we introduce the modularity total variation and show that
its box-constrained global maximum coincides with the maximum of the original
discrete modularity function. Thus we describe a new nonlinear optimization
approach to solve the equivalent problem leading to a community detection
strategy based on . The proposed approach relies on the use of a fast
first-order method that embeds a tailored active-set strategy. We report
extensive numerical comparisons with standard matrix-based approaches and the
Generalized RatioDCA approach for nonlinear modularity eigenvectors, showing
that our new method compares favourably with state-of-the-art alternatives
Stochastic Block Models are a Discrete Surface Tension
Networks, which represent agents and interactions between them, arise in
myriad applications throughout the sciences, engineering, and even the
humanities. To understand large-scale structure in a network, a common task is
to cluster a network's nodes into sets called "communities", such that there
are dense connections within communities but sparse connections between them. A
popular and statistically principled method to perform such clustering is to
use a family of generative models known as stochastic block models (SBMs). In
this paper, we show that maximum likelihood estimation in an SBM is a network
analog of a well-known continuum surface-tension problem that arises from an
application in metallurgy. To illustrate the utility of this relationship, we
implement network analogs of three surface-tension algorithms, with which we
successfully recover planted community structure in synthetic networks and
which yield fascinating insights on empirical networks that we construct from
hyperspectral videos.Comment: to appear in Journal of Nonlinear Scienc
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SIMPLIFIED ENERGY LANDSCAPE FOR MODULARITY USING TOTAL VARIATION
Networks capture pairwise interactions between entities and are frequently
used in applications such as social networks, food networks, and protein
interaction networks, to name a few. Communities, cohesive groups of nodes,
often form in these applications, and identifying them gives insight into the
overall organization of the network. One common quality function used to
identify community structure is modularity. In Hu et al. [SIAM J. App. Math.,
73(6), 2013], it was shown that modularity optimization is equivalent to
minimizing a particular nonconvex total variation (TV) based functional over a
discrete domain. They solve this problem, assuming the number of communities is
known, using a Merriman, Bence, Osher (MBO) scheme.
We show that modularity optimization is equivalent to minimizing a convex
TV-based functional over a discrete domain, again, assuming the number of
communities is known. Furthermore, we show that modularity has no convex
relaxation satisfying certain natural conditions. We therefore, find a
manageable non-convex approximation using a Ginzburg Landau functional, which
provably converges to the correct energy in the limit of a certain parameter.
We then derive an MBO algorithm with fewer hand-tuned parameters than in Hu et
al. and which is 7 times faster at solving the associated diffusion equation
due to the fact that the underlying discretization is unconditionally stable.
Our numerical tests include a hyperspectral video whose associated graph has
2.9x10^7 edges, which is roughly 37 times larger than was handled in the paper
of Hu et al