Online communities provide a unique way for individuals to access information from those in similar circumstances, which can be critical for health conditions that require daily and personalized management. As these groups and topics often arise organically, identifying the types of topics discussed is necessary to understand their needs. As well, these communities and people in them can be quite diverse, and existing community detection methods have not been extended towards evaluating these heterogeneities. This has been limited as community detection methodologies have not focused on community detection based on semantic relations between textual features of the user-generated content. Thus here we develop an approach, NeuroCom, that optimally finds dense groups of users as communities in a latent space inferred by neural representation of published contents of users. By embedding of words and messages, we show that NeuroCom demonstrates improved clustering and identifies more nuanced discussion topics in contrast to other common unsupervised learning approaches.
Methods for identifying relevant groups is an active area of research; a great deal of work is on graph-based data such as social or information networks. Community detection is then based on choosing an objective function that captures the intuition of a community as a set of nodes with better internal connectivity than external connectivity @cite_9 . This is a rich area of research and briefly summarizing, there is work across spectral algorithms @cite_16 , measures of centrality @cite_0 and matrix factorization @cite_11 .
@cite_0 @cite_9 @cite_16 @cite_11
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Community detection is a common problem in graph data analytics that consists of finding groups of densely connected nodes with few connections to nodes outside of the group. In particular, identifying communities in large-scale networks is an important task in many scientific domains. In this review, we evaluated eight state-of-the-art and five traditional algorithms for overlapping and disjoint community detection on large-scale real-world networks with known ground-truth communities. These 13 algorithms were empirically compared using goodness metrics that measure the structural properties of the identified communities, as well as performance metrics that evaluate these communities against the ground-truth. Our results show that these two types of metrics are not equivalent. That is, an algorithm may perform well in terms of goodness metrics, but poorly in terms of performance metrics, or vice versa. © 2014 The Authors. WIREs Computational Community detection in graphs is the problem of finding groups of vertices which are more densely connected than they are to the rest of the graph. This problem has a long history, but it is currently motivated by social and biological networks. While there are many ways to formalize it, one of the most popular is as an inference problem, where there is a planted “ground truth” community structure around which the graph is generated probabilistically. Our task is then to recover the ground truth knowing only the graph. Recently it was discovered, first h euristically i n p hysics a nd then rigorously in probability and computer science, that this problem has a phase transition at which it suddenly becomes impossible. Namely, if the graph is too sparse, or the probabilistic process that generates it is too noisy, then no algorithm can find a partition t hat i s correlated with the planted one—or even tell if there are communities, i.e., distinguish the graph from a purely random one with high probability. Above this information-theoretic threshold, there is a second threshold beyond which polynomial-time algorithms are known to succeed; in between, there is a regime in which community detection is possible, but conjectured to be exponentially hard. For computer scientists, this field offers a wealth of new ideas and open questions, with connections to probability and combinatorics, message-passing algorithms, and random matrix theory. Perhaps more importantly, it provides a window into the cultures of statistical physics and statistical inference, and how those cultures think about distributions of instances, landscapes of solutions, and hardness. Given a large network, local community detection aims at finding the community that contains a set of query nodes and also maximizes (minimizes) a goodness metric. This problem has recently drawn intense research interest. Various goodness metrics have been proposed. However, most existing metrics tend to include irrelevant subgraphs in the detected local community. We refer to such irrelevant subgraphs as free riders. We systematically study the existing goodness metrics and provide theoretical explanations on why they may cause the free rider effect. We further develop a query biased node weighting scheme to reduce the free rider effect. In particular, each node is weighted by its proximity to the query node. We define a query biased density metric to integrate the edge and node weights. The query biased densest subgraph, which has the largest query biased density, will shift to the neighborhood of the query nodes after node weighting. We then formulate the query biased densest connected subgraph (QDC) problem, study its complexity, and provide efficient algorithms to solve it. We perform extensive experiments on a variety of real and synthetic networks to evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed methods. Four major factors govern the intricacies of community extraction in networks: (1) the literature offers a multitude of disparate community detection algorithms whose output exhibits high structural variability across the collection, (2) communities identified by algorithms may differ structurally from real communities that arise in practice, (3) there is no consensus characterizing how to discriminate communities from noncommunities, and (4) the application domain includes a wide variety of networks of fundamentally different natures. In this article, we present a class separability framework to tackle these challenges through a comprehensive analysis of community properties. Our approach enables the assessment of the structural dissimilarity among the output of multiple community detection algorithms and between the output of algorithms and communities that arise in practice. In addition, our method provides us with a way to organize the vast collection of community detection algorithms by grouping those that behave similarly. Finally, we identify the most discriminative graph-theoretical properties of community signature and the small subset of properties that account for most of the biases of the different community detection algorithms. We illustrate our approach with an experimental analysis, which reveals nuances of the structure of real and extracted communities. In our experiments, we furnish our framework with the output of 10 different community detection procedures, representative of categories of popular algorithms available in the literature, applied to a diverse collection of large-scale real network datasets whose domains span biology, online shopping, and social systems. We also analyze communities identified by annotations that accompany the data, which reflect exemplar communities in various domain. We characterize these communities using a broad spectrum of community properties to produce the different structural classes. As our experiments show that community structure is not a universal concept, our framework enables an informed choice of the most suitable community detection method for identifying communities of a specific type in a given network and allows for a comparison of existing community detection algorithms while guiding the design of new ones. Community detection is an important issue in social network analysis. Most existing methods detect communities through analyzing the linkage of the network. The drawback is that each community identified by those methods can only reflect the strength of connections, but it cannot reflect the semantics such as the interesting topics shared by people. To address this problem, we propose a topic oriented community detection approach which combines both social objects clustering and link analysis. We first use a subspace clustering algorithm to group all the social objects into topics. Then we divide the members that are involved in those social objects into topical clusters, each corresponding to a distinct topic. In order to differentiate the strength of connections, we perform a link analysis on each topical cluster to detect the topical communities. Experiments on real data sets have shown that our approach was able to identify more meaningful communities. The quantitative evaluation indicated that our approach can achieve a better performance when the topics are at least as important as the links to the analysis. We consider the problem of detecting communities or modules in networks, groups of vertices with a higher-than-average density of edges connecting them. Previous work indicates that a robust approach to this problem is the maximization of the benefit function known as "modularity" over possible divisions of a network. Here we show that this maximization process can be written in terms of the eigenspectrum of a matrix we call the modularity matrix, which plays a role in community detection similar to that played by the graph Laplacian in graph partitioning calculations. This result leads us to a number of possible algorithms for detecting community structure, as well as several other results, including a spectral measure of bipartite structure in networks and a new centrality measure that identifies those vertices that occupy central positions within the communities to which they belong. The algorithms and measures proposed are illustrated with applications to a variety of real-world complex networks. Detecting and analyzing dense groups or communities from social and information networks has attracted immense attention over the last decade due to its enormous applicability in different domains. Community detection is an ill-defined problem, as the nature of the communities is not known in advance. The problem has turned even more complicated due to the fact that communities emerge in the network in various forms such as disjoint, overlapping, and hierarchical. Various heuristics have been proposed to address these challenges, depending on the application in hand. All these heuristics have been materialized in the form of new metrics, which in most cases are used as optimization functions for detecting the community structure, or provide an indication of the goodness of detected communities during evaluation. Over the last decade, a large number of such metrics have been proposed. Thus, there arises a need for an organized and detailed survey of the metrics proposed for community detection and evaluation. Here, we present a survey of the start-of-the-art metrics used for the detection and the evaluation of community structure. We also conduct experiments on synthetic and real networks to present a comparative analysis of these metrics in measuring the goodness of the underlying community structure. Detecting clusters or communities in large real-world graphs such as large social or information networks is a problem of considerable interest. In practice, one typically chooses an objective function that captures the intuition of a network cluster as set of nodes with better internal connectivity than external connectivity, and then one applies approximation algorithms or heuristics to extract sets of nodes that are related to the objective function and that "look like" good communities for the application of interest. In this paper, we explore a range of network community detection methods in order to compare them and to understand their relative performance and the systematic biases in the clusters they identify. We evaluate several common objective functions that are used to formalize the notion of a network community, and we examine several different classes of approximation algorithms that aim to optimize such objective functions. In addition, rather than simply fixing an objective and asking for an approximation to the best cluster of any size, we consider a size-resolved version of the optimization problem. Considering community quality as a function of its size provides a much finer lens with which to examine community detection algorithms, since objective functions and approximation algorithms often have non-obvious size-dependent behavior. Detecting clusters or communities in large real-world graphs such as large social or information networks is a problem of considerable interest. In practice, one typically chooses an objective function that captures the intuition of a network cluster as set of nodes with better internal connectivity than external connectivity, and then one applies approximation algorithms or heuristics to extract sets of nodes that are related to the objective function and that "look like" good communities for the application of interest. In this paper, we explore a range of network community detection methods in order to compare them and to understand their relative performance and the systematic biases in the clusters they identify. We evaluate several common objective functions that are used to formalize the notion of a network community, and we examine several different classes of approximation algorithms that aim to optimize such objective functions. In addition, rather than simply fixing an objective and asking for an approximation to the best cluster of any size, we consider a size-resolved version of the optimization problem. Considering community quality as a function of its size provides a much finer lens with which to examine community detection algorithms, since objective functions and approximation algorithms often have non-obvious size-dependent behavior. Recently community detection has attracted much interest in social media to understand the collective behaviours of users and allow individuals to be modeled in the context of the group. Most existing approaches for community detection exploit either users' social links or their published content, aiming at discovering groups of densely connected or highly similar users. They often fail to find effective communities due to excessive noise in content, sparsity in links, and heterogenous behaviours of users in social media. Further, they are unable to provide insights and rationales behind the formation of the group and the collective behaviours of the users. To tackle these challenges, we propose to discover communities in a low- dimensional latent space in which we simultaneously learn the representation of users and communities. In particular, we integrated different social views of the network into a low-dimensional latent space in which we sought dense clusters of users as communities. By imposing a Laplacian regularizer into affiliation matrix, we further incorporated prior knowledge into the community discovery process. Finally community profiles were computed by a linear operator integrating the profiles of members. Taking the wellness domain as an example, we conducted experiments on a large scale real world dataset of users tweeting about diabetes and its related concepts, which demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in discovering and profiling user communities. Community detection is an important task for mining the structure and function of complex networks. Generally, there are several different kinds of nodes in a network which are cluster nodes densely connected within communities, as well as some special nodes like hubs bridging multiple communities and outliers marginally connected with a community. In addition, it has been shown that there is a hierarchical structure in complex networks with communities embedded within other communities. Therefore, a good algorithm is desirable to be able to not only detect hierarchical communities, but also identify hubs and outliers. In this paper, we propose a parameter-free hierarchical network clustering algorithm SHRINK by combining the advantages of density-based clustering and modularity optimization methods. Based on the structural connectivity information, the proposed algorithm can effectively reveal the embedded hierarchical community structure with multiresolution in large-scale weighted undirected networks, and identify hubs and outliers as well. Moreover, it overcomes the sensitive threshold problem of density-based clustering algorithms and the resolution limit possessed by other modularity-based methods. To illustrate our methodology, we conduct experiments with both real-world and synthetic datasets for community detection, and compare with many other baseline methods. Experimental results demonstrate that SHRINK achieves the best performance with consistent improvements. Community detection is an important technique to understand structures and patterns in complex networks. Recently, overlapping community detection becomes a trend due to the ubiquity of overlapping and nested communities in real world. However, existing approaches have ignored the use of implicit link preference information, i.e., links can reflect a node's preference on the targets of connections it wants to build. This information has strong impact on community detection since a node prefers to build links with nodes inside its community than those outside its community. In this paper, we propose a preference-based nonnegative matrix factorization (PNMF) model to incorporate implicit link preference information. Unlike conventional matrix factorization approaches, which simply approximate the original adjacency matrix in value, our model maximizes the likelihood of the preference order for each node by following the intuition that a node prefers its neighbors than other nodes. Our model overcomes the indiscriminate penalty problem in which non-linked pairs inside one community are equally penalized in objective functions as those across two communities. We propose a learning algorithm which can learn a node-community membership matrix via stochastic gradient descent with bootstrap sampling. We evaluate our PNMF model on several real-world networks. Experimental results show that our model outperforms state-of-the-art approaches and can be applied to large datasets. Community detection is a common problem in various types of big graphs. It is meaningful to understand the functions and dynamics of networks. The challenges of detecting community for big graphs include high computational cost, no prior information, etc.. In this work, we analyze the process of random walking in graphs, and find out that the weight of an edge gotten by processing the vertices visited by the walker could be an indicator to measure the closeness of vertex connection. Based on this idea, we propose a community detection algorithm for undirected big graphs which consists of three steps, including random walking using a single walker, weight calculating for edges and community detecting. Our algorithm is running in O(n2) without prior information. Experimental results show that our algorithm is capable of detecting the community structure and the overlapping parts of graphs in real-world effectively, and handling the challenges of community detection in big graph era. Community detection, which aims to cluster @math nodes in a given graph into @math distinct groups based on the observed undirected edges, is an important problem in network data analysis. In this paper, the popular stochastic block model (SBM) is extended to the generalized stochastic block model (GSBM) that allows for adversarial outlier nodes, which are connected with the other nodes in the graph in an arbitrary way. Under this model, we introduce a procedure using convex optimization followed by @math -means algorithm with @math . Both theoretical and numerical properties of the method are analyzed. A theoretical guarantee is given for the procedure to accurately detect the communities with small misclassification rate under the setting where the number of clusters can grow with @math . This theoretical result admits to the best-known result in the literature of computationally feasible community detection in SBM without outliers. Numerical results show that our method is both computationally fast and robust to different kinds of outliers, while some popular computationally fast community detection algorithms, such as spectral clustering applied to adjacency matrices or graph Laplacians, may fail to retrieve the major clusters due to a small portion of outliers. We apply a slight modification of our method to a political blogs data set, showing that our method is competent in practice and comparable to existing computationally feasible methods in the literature. To the best of the authors' knowledge, our result is the first in the literature in terms of clustering communities with fast growing numbers under the GSBM where a portion of arbitrary outlier nodes exist. Graph clustering has been widely applied in exploring regularities emerging in relational data. Recently, the rapid development of network theory correlates graph clustering with the detection of community structure, a common and important topological characteristic of networks. Most existing methods investigate the community structure at a single topological scale. However, as shown by empirical studies, the community structure of real world networks often exhibits multiple topological descriptions, corresponding to the clustering at different resolutions. Furthermore, the detection of multiscale community structure is heavily affected by the heterogeneous distribution of node degree. It is very challenging to detect multiscale community structure in heterogeneous networks. In this paper, we propose a novel, unified framework for detecting community structure from the perspective of dimensionality reduction. Based on the framework, we first prove that the well-known Laplacian matrix for network partition and the widely-used modularity matrix for community detection are two kinds of covariance matrices used in dimensionality reduction. We then propose a novel method to detect communities at multiple topological scales within our framework. We further show that existing algorithms fail to deal with heterogeneous node degrees. We develop a novel method to handle heterogeneity of networks by introducing a rescaling transformation into the covariance matrices in our framework. Extensive tests on real world and artificial networks demonstrate that the proposed correlation matrices significantly outperform Laplacian and modularity matrices in terms of their ability to identify multiscale community structure in heterogeneous networks. This paper considers the problem of algorithm selection for community detection. The aim of community detection is to identify sets of nodes in a network which are more interconnected relative to their connectivity to the rest of the network. A large number of algorithms have been developed to tackle this problem, but as with any machine learning task there is no "one-size-fits-all" and each algorithm excels in a specific part of the problem space. This paper examines the performance of algorithms developed for weighted networks against those using unweighted networks for different parts of the problem space (parameterised by the intra inter community links). It is then demonstrated how the choice of algorithm (weighted unweighted) can be made based only on the observed network. Community detection is a fundamental statistical problem in network data analysis. Many algorithms have been proposed to tackle this problem. Most of these algorithms are not guaranteed to achieve the statistical optimality of the problem, while procedures that achieve information theoretic limits for general parameter spaces are not computationally tractable. In this paper, we present a computationally feasible two-stage method that achieves optimal statistical performance in misclassification proportion for stochastic block model under weak regularity conditions. Our two-stage procedure consists of a generic refinement step that can take a wide range of weakly consistent community detection procedures as initializer, to which the refinement stage applies and outputs a community assignment achieving optimal misclassification proportion with high probability. The practical effectiveness of the new algorithm is demonstrated by competitive numerical results. Abstract Community detection in networks is one of the most popular topics of modern network science. Communities, or clusters, are usually groups of vertices having higher probability of being connected to each other than to members of other groups, though other patterns are possible. Identifying communities is an ill-defined problem. There are no universal protocols on the fundamental ingredients, like the definition of community itself, nor on other crucial issues, like the validation of algorithms and the comparison of their performances. This has generated a number of confusions and misconceptions, which undermine the progress in the field. We offer a guided tour through the main aspects of the problem. We also point out strengths and weaknesses of popular methods, and give directions to their use. With the recent advances in information networks, the problem of community detection has attracted much attention in the last decade. While network community detection has been ubiquitous, the task of collecting complete network data remains challenging in many real-world applications. Usually the collected network is incomplete with most of the edges missing. Commonly, in such networks, all nodes with attributes are available while only the edges within a few local regions of the network can be observed. In this paper, we study the problem of detecting communities in incomplete information networks with missing edges. We first learn a distance metric to reproduce the link-based distance between nodes from the observed edges in the local information regions. We then use the learned distance metric to estimate the distance between any pair of nodes in the network. A hierarchical clustering approach is proposed to detect communities within the incomplete information networks. Empirical studies on real-world information networks demonstrate that our proposed method can effectively detect community structures within incomplete information networks. Across many scientific domains, there is a common need to automatically extract a simplified view or coarse-graining of how a complex system’s components interact. This general task is called community detection in networks and is analogous to searching for clusters in independent vector data. It is common to evaluate the performance of community detection algorithms by their ability to find so-called ground truth communities. This works well in synthetic networks with planted communities because these networks’ links are formed explicitly based on those known communities. However, there are no planted communities in real-world networks. Instead, it is standard practice to treat some observed discrete-valued node attributes, or metadata, as ground truth. We show that metadata are not the same as ground truth and that treating them as such induces severe theoretical and practical problems. We prove that no algorithm can uniquely solve community detection, and we prove a general No Free Lunch theorem for community detection, which implies that there can be no algorithm that is optimal for all possible community detection tasks. However, community detection remains a powerful tool and node metadata still have value, so a careful exploration of their relationship with network structure can yield insights of genuine worth. We illustrate this point by introducing two statistical techniques that can quantify the relationship between metadata and community structure for a broad class of models. We demonstrate these techniques using both synthetic and real-world networks, and for multiple types of metadata and community structures.