Detecting communities in networks using a Bayesian nonparametric method

Abstract

In the real world, a large amount of systems can be described by networks where nodes represent entities and edges the interconnections between them. Community structure in networks is one of the interesting properties revealed in the study of networks. Many methods have been developed to extract communities from networks using the generative models which give the probability of generating networks based on some assumption about the communities. However, many generative models require setting the number of communities in the network. The methods based on such models are lack of practicality, because the number of communities is unknown before determining the communities. In this paper, the Bayesian nonparametric method is used to develop a new community detection method. First, a generative model is built to give the probability of generating the network and its communities. Next, the model parameters and the number of communities are calculated by fitting the model to the actual network. Finally, the communities in the network can be determined using the model parameters. In the experiments, we apply the proposed method to the synthetic and real-world networks, comparing with some other community detection methods. The experimental results show that the proposed method is efficient to detect communities in networks.