Beyond Asymptotics: Practical Insights into Community Detection in Complex Networks

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Ke, Tianjun, Xu, Zhiyu
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866912145012162560
author Ke, Tianjun
Xu, Zhiyu
author_facet Ke, Tianjun
Xu, Zhiyu
contents The stochastic block model (SBM) is a fundamental tool for community detection in networks, yet the finite-sample performance of inference methods remains underexplored. We evaluate key algorithms-spectral methods, variational inference, and Gibbs sampling-under varying conditions, including signal-to-noise ratios, heterogeneous community sizes, and multimodality. Our results highlight significant performance variations: spectral methods, especially SCORE, excel in computational efficiency and scalability, while Gibbs sampling dominates in small, well-separated networks. Variational Expectation-Maximization strikes a balance between accuracy and cost in larger networks but struggles with optimization in highly imbalanced settings. These findings underscore the practical trade-offs among methods and provide actionable guidance for algorithm selection in real-world applications. Our results also call for further theoretical investigation in SBMs with complex structures. The code can be found at https://github.com/Toby-X/SBM_computation.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2412_03805
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Beyond Asymptotics: Practical Insights into Community Detection in Complex Networks
Ke, Tianjun
Xu, Zhiyu
Social and Information Networks
Applications
The stochastic block model (SBM) is a fundamental tool for community detection in networks, yet the finite-sample performance of inference methods remains underexplored. We evaluate key algorithms-spectral methods, variational inference, and Gibbs sampling-under varying conditions, including signal-to-noise ratios, heterogeneous community sizes, and multimodality. Our results highlight significant performance variations: spectral methods, especially SCORE, excel in computational efficiency and scalability, while Gibbs sampling dominates in small, well-separated networks. Variational Expectation-Maximization strikes a balance between accuracy and cost in larger networks but struggles with optimization in highly imbalanced settings. These findings underscore the practical trade-offs among methods and provide actionable guidance for algorithm selection in real-world applications. Our results also call for further theoretical investigation in SBMs with complex structures. The code can be found at https://github.com/Toby-X/SBM_computation.
title Beyond Asymptotics: Practical Insights into Community Detection in Complex Networks
topic Social and Information Networks
Applications
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.03805