Sifting out communities in large sparse networks

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Climer, Sharlee, Smith Jr, Kenneth, Yang, Wei, Fuentes, Lisa de las, Dávila-Román, Victor G., Gu, C. Charles
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Climer, Sharlee
Smith Jr, Kenneth
Yang, Wei
Fuentes, Lisa de las
Dávila-Román, Victor G.
Gu, C. Charles
author_facet Climer, Sharlee
Smith Jr, Kenneth
Yang, Wei
Fuentes, Lisa de las
Dávila-Román, Victor G.
Gu, C. Charles
contents Research data sets are growing to unprecedented sizes and network modeling is commonly used to extract complex relationships in diverse domains, such as genetic interactions involved in disease, logistics, and social communities. As the number of nodes increases in a network, an increasing sparsity of edges is a practical limitation due to memory restrictions. Moreover, many of these sparse networks exhibit very large numbers of nodes with no adjacent edges, as well as disjoint components of nodes with no edges connecting them. A prevalent aim in network modeling is the identification of clusters, or communities, of nodes that are highly interrelated. Several definitions of strong community structure have been introduced to facilitate this task, each with inherent assumptions and biases. We introduce an intuitive objective function for quantifying the quality of clustering results in large sparse networks. We utilize a two-step method for identifying communities which is especially well-suited for this domain as the first step efficiently divides the network into the disjoint components, while the second step optimizes clustering of the produced components based on the new objective. Using simulated networks, optimization based on the new objective function consistently yields significantly higher accuracy than those based on the modularity function, with the widest gaps appearing for the noisiest networks. Additionally, applications to benchmark problems illustrate the intuitive correctness of our approach. Finally, the practicality of our approach is demonstrated in real-world data in which we identify complex genetic interactions in large-scale networks comprised of tens of thousands of nodes. Based on these three different types of trials, our results clearly demonstrate the usefulness of our two-step procedure and the accuracy of our simple objective.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2405_00816
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Sifting out communities in large sparse networks
Climer, Sharlee
Smith Jr, Kenneth
Yang, Wei
Fuentes, Lisa de las
Dávila-Román, Victor G.
Gu, C. Charles
Social and Information Networks
Machine Learning
Research data sets are growing to unprecedented sizes and network modeling is commonly used to extract complex relationships in diverse domains, such as genetic interactions involved in disease, logistics, and social communities. As the number of nodes increases in a network, an increasing sparsity of edges is a practical limitation due to memory restrictions. Moreover, many of these sparse networks exhibit very large numbers of nodes with no adjacent edges, as well as disjoint components of nodes with no edges connecting them. A prevalent aim in network modeling is the identification of clusters, or communities, of nodes that are highly interrelated. Several definitions of strong community structure have been introduced to facilitate this task, each with inherent assumptions and biases. We introduce an intuitive objective function for quantifying the quality of clustering results in large sparse networks. We utilize a two-step method for identifying communities which is especially well-suited for this domain as the first step efficiently divides the network into the disjoint components, while the second step optimizes clustering of the produced components based on the new objective. Using simulated networks, optimization based on the new objective function consistently yields significantly higher accuracy than those based on the modularity function, with the widest gaps appearing for the noisiest networks. Additionally, applications to benchmark problems illustrate the intuitive correctness of our approach. Finally, the practicality of our approach is demonstrated in real-world data in which we identify complex genetic interactions in large-scale networks comprised of tens of thousands of nodes. Based on these three different types of trials, our results clearly demonstrate the usefulness of our two-step procedure and the accuracy of our simple objective.
title Sifting out communities in large sparse networks
topic Social and Information Networks
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.00816