Model-Based Method for Social Network Clustering

Abstract

We propose a simple mixed membership model for social network clustering in this note. A flexible function is adopted to measure affinities among a set of entities in a social network. The model not only allows each entity in the network to possess more than one membership, but also provides accurate statistical inference about network structure. We estimate the membership parameters by using an MCMC algorithm. We evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm by applying our model to two empirical social network data, the Zachary club data and the bottlenose dolphin network data. We also conduct some numerical studies for different types of simulated networks for assessing the effectiveness of our algorithm. In the end, some concluding remarks and future work are addressed briefly