To find interesting structure in networks, community detection algorithms have to take into account not only the network topology, but also dynamics of interactions between nodes. We investigate this claim using the paradigm of synchronization in a network of coupled oscillators. As the network evolves to a global steady state, nodes belonging to the same community synchronize faster than nodes belonging to different communities. Traditionally, nodes in network synchronization models are coupled via one-to-one, or conservative interactions. However, social interactions are often one-to-many, as for example, in social media, where users broadcast messages to all their followers. We formulate a novel model of synchronization in a network of coupled oscillators in which the oscillators are coupled via one-to-many, or non-conservative interactions. We study the dynamics of different interaction models and contrast their spectral properties. To find multi-scale community structure in a network of interacting nodes, we define a similarity function that measures the degree to which nodes are synchronized and use it to hierarchically cluster nodes. We study real-world social networks, including networks of two social media providers. To evaluate the quality of the discovered communities in a social media network we propose a community quality metric based on user activity. We find that conservative and non-conservative interaction models lead to dramatically different views of community structure even within the same network. Our work offers a novel mathematical framework for exploring the relationship between network structure, topology and dynamics.
It might be argued that taking interactions into account eventually leads to a weighted graph and off-the shelf community detection algorithms for weighted graphs @cite_4 might be applied. However, like in the unweighted case, application of a community detection method on a weighted graph without taking the nature of interaction process into account, might lead to unsatisfactory results. For example, if conductance minimization algorithm is applied on a weighted graph, whose weights are a consequence of a non-conservative process, the structure detected might differ significantly from ground truth. Our method on the other hand learns the weights from the interaction process and then detects structure dynamically. Learning the underlying interaction process from the activity logs of nodes of the network and using this process to determine the community structure is the course of future work.
@cite_4
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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. The connections in many networks are not merely binary entities, either present or not, but have associated weights that record their strengths relative to one another. Recent studies of networks have, by and large, steered clear of such weighted networks, which are often perceived as being harder to analyze than their unweighted counterparts. Here we point out that weighted networks can in many cases be analyzed using a simple mapping from a weighted network to an unweighted multigraph, allowing us to apply standard techniques for unweighted graphs to weighted ones as well. We give a number of examples of the method, including an algorithm for detecting community structure in weighted networks and a simple proof of the maximum-flow--minimum-cut theorem. Community sub graphs are characterized by dense connections or interactions among its nodes. Community detection and evaluation is an important task in graph mining. A variety of measures have been proposed to evaluate the quality of such communities. In this paper, we evaluate communities based on the k-core concept, as means of evaluating their collaborative nature - a property not captured by the single node metrics or by the established community evaluation metrics. Based on the k-core, which essentially measures the robustness of a community under degeneracy, we extend it to weighted graphs, devising a novel concept of k-cores on weighted graphs. We applied the k-core approach on large real world graphs -- such as DBLP and report interesting results. In local community detection by seed expansion a single cluster concentrated around few given query nodes in a graph is discovered in a localized way. Conductance is a popular objective function used in many algorithms for local community detection. Algorithms that directly optimize conductance usually add or remove one node at a time to find a local optimum. This amounts to fix a specific neighborhood structure over clusters. A natural way to avoid the problem of choosing a specific neighborhood structure is to use a continuous relaxation of conductance. This paper studies such a continuous relaxation of conductance. We show that in this setting continuous optimization leads to hard clusters. We investigate the relation of conductance with weighted kernel k-means for a single cluster, which leads to the introduction of a weighted kernel 1-mean objective function, called -conductance, where is a parameter which influences the size of the community. Conductance is obtained by setting to 0. Two algorithms for local optimization of -conductance based on the expectation maximization and the projected gradient descend method are developed, called EMc and PGDc, respectively. We show that for =0 EMc corresponds to gradient descend with an infinite step size at each iteration. We design a procedure to automatically select a value for . Performance guarantee for these algorithms is proven for a class of dense communities centered around the seeds and well separated from the rest of the network. On this class we also prove that our algorithms stay localized. A comparative experimental analysis on networks with ground-truth communities is performed using state-of-the-art algorithms based on the graph diffusion method. Our experiments indicate that EMc and PGDc stay localized and produce communities most similar to the ground.