Dynamic community detection based on graph convolutional networks and contrastive learning

Abstract

With the continuous development of technology and networks, real-life interactions are gradually being abstracted into social networks for study. Social circles are a fundamental structural feature that is prevalent on social networks. Thus, exploring social circle structure plays an important role in revealing the characteristics of complex social networks and provides guidance for understanding social behavior in real life. For example, it can aid in precision marketing, personalized recommendation, and knowledge dissemination within social circles. One of the important means of identifying social network circles lies on community detection algorithms. However, real-world social networks are often dynamic and can be studied and analyzed by building dynamic networks, while existing dynamic network community detection methods tend to ignore the global structure information and time-series information of nodes. To address this problem, this paper proposes a dynamic network community detection algorithm based on graph convolutional neural networks and contrastive learning, which fully captures the adjacent characteristics between nodes based on the correlation information and leverages the feature smoothing strategy to efficiently extract node representations of dynamic networks under unsupervised scenario. Specifically, the proposed algorithm first utilizes node correlation based aggregation strategy to compute the feature matrix for single time-step of the dynamic network. Then, mutual information maximization is implemented based on cross-entropy between learned local and global representations. To reduce the computational overhead in the optimization process, an additional LSTM module is further equipped for updating the parameters of graph convolutional networks in each time-step. Additionally, a contrastive learning based network smoothing strategy is designed to minimize the feature differences between neighboring nodes. Comparative experiments demonstrate that the proposed algorithm achieves excellent performance on both synthetic and real networks.