Community detection method based on mixed-norm sparse subspace clustering

Community or group is an important structure in disciplines such as social networks, biology gene expression, and physics systems. Community detections for different types of networks have attracted considerable interest. However, it is still challenging to find meaningful community structures in various networks. In particular, accurate community description and implementation of effective detection algorithms with huge datasets are still not solved. In this paper, we present a novel community detection algorithm based on the theory of sparse subspace clustering (SSC) with mixed-norm constraints. Inspired by the sparse representation of subspace, each community in a given network can span a subspace in some similarity measure space. If the basis of subspaces can be solved, all of the nodes can be represented as a linear combination of the nodes that span the same subspace. By introducing a novel mixed-norm constraint in SCC, the connections of nodes among different communities are modeled as noise to improve the clustering accuracy. The formulation of the basis of subspaces is derived from the self-representation property of data by using SSC. Then, the alternating directions method of multipliers (ADMM) framework is used to solve the formulation. Finally, communities are detected by subspace clustering method. The proposed method is compared with state-of-the-art algorithms on synthetic networks and real-world networks. The experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm in accurately describing the community. The results also show that the mixed-norm SSC is a practical approach for detecting communities in huge datasets

Meta-learning for Multi-variable Non-convex Optimization Problems: Iterating Non-optimums Makes Optimum Possible

In this paper, we aim to address the problem of solving a non-convex optimization problem over an intersection of multiple variable sets. This kind of problems is typically solved by using an alternating minimization (AM) strategy which splits the overall problem into a set of sub-problems corresponding to each variable, and then iteratively performs minimization over each sub-problem using a fixed updating rule. However, due to the intrinsic non-convexity of the overall problem, the optimization can usually be trapped into bad local minimum even when each sub-problem can be globally optimized at each iteration. To tackle this problem, we propose a meta-learning based Global Scope Optimization (GSO) method. It adaptively generates optimizers for sub-problems via meta-learners and constantly updates these meta-learners with respect to the global loss information of the overall problem. Therefore, the sub-problems are optimized with the objective of minimizing the global loss specifically. We evaluate the proposed model on a number of simulations, including solving bi-linear inverse problems: matrix completion, and non-linear problems: Gaussian mixture models. The experimental results show that our proposed approach outperforms AM-based methods in standard settings, and is able to achieve effective optimization in some challenging cases while other methods would typically fail.Comment: 15 pages, 8 figure