Constant communities in complex networks

Towards explainable community finding

The detection of communities of nodes is an important task in understanding the structure of networks. Multiple approaches have been developed to tackle this problem, many of which are in common usage in real-world applications, such as in public health networks. However, clear insight into the reasoning behind the community labels produced by these algorithms is rarely provided. Drawing inspiration from the machine learning literature, we aim to provide post-hoc explanations for the outputs of these algorithms using interpretable features of the network. In this paper, we propose a model-agnostic methodology that identifies a set of informative features to help explain the output of a community finding algorithm. We apply it to three well-known algorithms, though the methodology is designed to generalise to new approaches. As well as identifying important features for a post-hoc explanation system, we report on the common features found made by the different algorithms and the differences between the approaches.

SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s41109-022-00515-6.

A Consensus Community-Based Particle Swarm Optimization for Dynamic Community Detection

The community detection in dynamic networks is essential for important applications such as social network analysis. Such detection requires simultaneous maximization of the clustering accuracy at the current time step while minimization of the clustering drift between two successive time steps. In most situations, such objectives are often in conflict with each other. This article proposes the concept of consensus community. Knowledge from the previous step is obtained by extracting the intrapopulation consensus communities from the optimal population of the previous step. Subsequently, the intrapopulation consensus communities of the previous step obtained is voted by the population of the current time step during the evolutionary process. A subset of the consensus communities, which receives a high support rate, will be recognized as the interpopulation consensus communities of the previous and current steps. Interpopulation consensus communities are the knowledge that can be transferred from the previous to the current step. The population of the current time step can evolve toward the direction similar to the population in the previous time step by retaining such interpopulation consensus community during the evolutionary process. Community structure is subjected to evaluation, update, and mutation events, which are directed by using interpopulation consensus community information during the evolutionary process. The experimental results over many artificial and real-world dynamic networks illustrate that the proposed method produces more accurate and robust results than those of the state-of-the-art approaches.

Consistency of community structure in complex networks

The most widely used techniques for community detection in networks, including methods based on modularity, statistical inference, and information theoretic arguments, all work by optimizing objective functions that measure the quality of network partitions. There is a good case to be made, however, that one should not look solely at the single optimal community structure under such an objective function but rather at a selection of high-scoring structures. If one does this, one typically finds that the resulting structures show considerable variation, which could be taken as evidence that these community detection methods are unreliable, since they do not appear to give consistent answers. Here we argue that, upon closer inspection, the structures found are in fact consistent in a certain way. Specifically, we show that they can all be assembled from a set of underlying "building blocks," groups of network nodes that are usually found together in the same community. Different community structures correspond to different arrangements of blocks, but the blocks themselves are largely invariant. We propose an information theoretic method for discovering the building blocks in specific networks and demonstrate it with several example applications. We conclude that traditional community detection does in fact give a significant amount of insight into network structure.

Constructing Temporally Extended Actions through Incremental Community Detection

Hierarchical reinforcement learning works on temporally extended actions or skills to facilitate learning. How to automatically form such abstraction is challenging, and many efforts tackle this issue in the options framework. While various approaches exist to construct options from different perspectives, few of them concentrate on options' adaptability during learning. This paper presents an algorithm to create options and enhance their quality online. Both aspects operate on detected communities of the learning environment's state transition graph. We first construct options from initial samples as the basis of online learning. Then a rule-based community revision algorithm is proposed to update graph partitions, based on which existing options can be continuously tuned. Experimental results in two problems indicate that options from initial samples may perform poorly in more complex environments, and our presented strategy can effectively improve options and get better results compared with flat reinforcement learning.