Iterative embedding and reweighting of complex networks reveals community structure

Abstract

Graph embeddings learn the structure of networks and represent it in low-dimensional vector spaces. Community structure is one of the features that are recognized and reproduced by embeddings. We show that an iterative procedure, in which a graph is repeatedly embedded and its links are reweighted based on the geometric proximity between the nodes, reinforces intra-community links and weakens inter-community links, making the clusters of the initial network more visible and more easily detectable. The geometric separation between the communities can become so strong that even a very simple parsing of the links may recover the communities as isolated components with surprisingly high precision. Furthermore, when used as a pre-processing step, our embedding and reweighting procedure can improve the performance of traditional community detection algorithms.