Attribute Diversity Aware Community Detection on Attributed Graphs Using Three-View Graph Attention Neural Networks

Abstract

Community detection is a fundamental yet important task for characterizing and understanding the structure of attributed graphs. Existing methods mainly focus on the structural tightness and attribute similarity among nodes in a community. However, grouping numerous semantically homogeneous nodes will result in information cocoons and thus reduce the robustness of community structure and the efficiency of node collaboration in real-world applications, such as recommendation systems and collaboration networks. Since nodes with closer connections tend to be more similar, finding communities with dense structures and diverse attributes poses great challenges to mining latent relationships between the graph structure and attribute distribution. To our best knowledge, very little research has been conducted to address this challenge. In this article, we propose a novel three-view graph attention neural networks (TvGANN) model to formally address the attribute diversity aware community detection problem. TvGANN reveals correlations between the graph structure and attributes distribution from the perspective of node organization, attribute co-occurrence, and the node-attribute interaction. It effectively captures structural features and attributes distribution by feeding a structural network and an attribute co-occurrence network into graph attention modules through the encoder–decoder framework. It also learns heterogeneous information by feeding a network into a meta-node attention module. Then, it fuzes the three modules and clusters the embedding representations through a Student's t -distribution approach, which iteratively refines the clustering results. The experiments show that our method not only improves the quality in dense community detection but also performs efficiently for attributed graphs.