Community detection in bipartite signed networks is highly dependent on parameter choice

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Candellone, Elena, van Kesteren, Erik-Jan, Chelmi, Sofia, Garcia-Bernardo, Javier
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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_version_ 1866912218063306752
author Candellone, Elena
van Kesteren, Erik-Jan
Chelmi, Sofia
Garcia-Bernardo, Javier
author_facet Candellone, Elena
van Kesteren, Erik-Jan
Chelmi, Sofia
Garcia-Bernardo, Javier
contents Decision-making processes often involve voting. Human interactions with exogenous entities such as legislations or products can be effectively modeled as two-mode (bipartite) signed networks-where people can either vote positively, negatively, or abstain from voting on the entities. Detecting communities in such networks could help us understand underlying properties: for example ideological camps or consumer preferences. While community detection is an established practice separately for bipartite and signed networks, it remains largely unexplored in the case of bipartite signed networks. In this paper, we systematically evaluate the efficacy of community detection methods on projected bipartite signed networks using a synthetic benchmark and real-world datasets. Our findings reveal that when no communities are present in the data, these methods often recover spurious user communities. When communities are present, the algorithms exhibit promising performance, although their performance is highly susceptible to parameter choice. This indicates that researchers using community detection methods in the context of bipartite signed networks should not take the communities found at face value: it is essential to assess the robustness of parameter choices or perform domain-specific external validation.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2405_08203
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Community detection in bipartite signed networks is highly dependent on parameter choice
Candellone, Elena
van Kesteren, Erik-Jan
Chelmi, Sofia
Garcia-Bernardo, Javier
Physics and Society
Social and Information Networks
Methodology
Decision-making processes often involve voting. Human interactions with exogenous entities such as legislations or products can be effectively modeled as two-mode (bipartite) signed networks-where people can either vote positively, negatively, or abstain from voting on the entities. Detecting communities in such networks could help us understand underlying properties: for example ideological camps or consumer preferences. While community detection is an established practice separately for bipartite and signed networks, it remains largely unexplored in the case of bipartite signed networks. In this paper, we systematically evaluate the efficacy of community detection methods on projected bipartite signed networks using a synthetic benchmark and real-world datasets. Our findings reveal that when no communities are present in the data, these methods often recover spurious user communities. When communities are present, the algorithms exhibit promising performance, although their performance is highly susceptible to parameter choice. This indicates that researchers using community detection methods in the context of bipartite signed networks should not take the communities found at face value: it is essential to assess the robustness of parameter choices or perform domain-specific external validation.
title Community detection in bipartite signed networks is highly dependent on parameter choice
topic Physics and Society
Social and Information Networks
Methodology
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.08203