Community Detection Approach Research Articles

A multi-constrained matrix factorization approach for community detection relying on alternating-direction-method of multipliers

A multi-constrained matrix factorization approach for community detection relying on alternating-direction-method of multipliers

XLoCoFC: A Fast Fuzzy Community Detection Approach Based on Expandable Local Communities Through Max-Membership Degree Propagation

XLoCoFC: A Fast Fuzzy Community Detection Approach Based on Expandable Local Communities Through Max-Membership Degree Propagation

Communities in C. elegans connectome through the prism of non-backtracking walks

The fundamental relationship between the mesoscopic structure of neuronal circuits and organismic functions they subserve is one of the major challenges in contemporary neuroscience. Formation of structurally connected modules of neurons enacts the conversion from single-cell firing to large-scale behaviour of an organism, highlighting the importance of their accurate profiling in the data. While connectomes are typically characterized by significant sparsity of neuronal connections, recent advances in network theory and machine learning have revealed fundamental limitations of traditionally used community detection approaches in cases where the network is sparse. Here we studied the optimal community structure in the structural connectome of Caenorhabditis elegans, for which we exploited a non-conventional approach that is based on non-backtracking random walks, virtually eliminating the sparsity issue. In full agreement with the previous asymptotic results, we demonstrated that non-backtracking walks resolve the ground truth annotation into clusters on stochastic block models (SBM) with the size and density of the connectome better than the spectral methods related to simple random walks. Based on the cluster detectability threshold, we determined that the optimal number of modules in a recently mapped connectome of C. elegans is 10, which precisely corresponds to the number of isolated eigenvalues in the spectrum of the non-backtracking flow matrix. The discovered communities have a clear interpretation in terms of their functional role, which allows one to discern three structural compartments in the worm: the Worm Brain (WB), the Worm Movement Controller (WMC), and the Worm Information Flow Connector (WIFC). Broadly, our work provides a robust network-based framework to reveal mesoscopic structures in sparse connectomic datasets, paving way to further investigation of connectome mechanisms for different functions.

A community detection model using node embedding approach and graph convolutional network with clustering technique

The communities in a network have distinct characteristics and interrelationships. Community discovery methods based on node embedding and deep learning have surpassed spectral clustering and statistical inference as the preferred methods for handling high-dimensional network data. Community detection in graph networks using graph neural networks (GNNs) is a rapidly expanding field of study that has attracted much attention recently. Inspired by the graph convolutional network (GCN) approach, promising results in evaluating graph structure data, a different method for discovering communities using node embedding using Node2Vec via graph convolutional networks (CD2NE-GCN) model has been proposed. It has been evaluated against the most recent standard methods of graph attention network (GAT), GCN-based approach for Unsupervised Community Detection (GUCD), and Graph Adversarial Networks (GAN). In this paper, a technique for community detection that combines the ideas of graph neural network design with node embedding via message forwarding has been presented. The experimentation has made use of five benchmark datasets: Karate, Cora, CiteSeer, Facebook, and DBLP. In the first set of trials, the node2vec uses the skip-gram with negative sampling (SGNS) approach via biased random walks of the second order to produce node embeddings and feed them to the graph convolutional network. The weighted average matrix and scaled normalized matrices of low-dimensional vertices have been calculated. In the next set of experiments, the average weighted matrix was sent to the 3-layer GCN with the activation function for generating feature vectors and applied clustering technique for predicting communities. The CD2NE-GCN approach outperforms previous literature by detecting graph network communities with accuracy scores of 98.45%, 99.04%, 96.39%, 98.79%, and 97.67% for Karate, Cora, CiteSeer, Facebook, and DBLP datasets, respectively. Thus, graph convolutional network models with a node embedding approach enhance the accuracy.

A multi-agent-based approach for community detection using association rules

A multi-agent-based approach for community detection using association rules

A community detection approach based on network representation learning for repository mining

In this paper, we propose a novel heterogeneous graph-based model for capturing and handling all the complex and strongly-correlated information of a software Developer Social Network (DSN) to support several analytic tasks. In particular, we challenge the problem of automatically discovering communities of software developers sharing interests for similar projects by relying on Social Network Analysis (SNA) findings. To overcome the huge graph-size issue, we leverage different graph embedding techniques. Eventually, we evaluate the proposed approach with respect to state-of-the-art approaches from an efficiency and an effectiveness point of view by carrying out an experiment involving the GitHub dataset.

Improving Cryptocurrency Crime Detection: CoinJoin Community Detection Approach

The potential of Bitcoin for money laundering and terrorist financing represents a significant challenge in law enforcement. In recent years, the use of privacy-improving CoinJoin transactions has grown significantly and helped criminal actors obfuscate Bitcoin money flows. In this study, we use unsupervised machine learning to analyze the complete Bitcoin user graph in order to identify suspicious actors potentially involved in illegal activities. In contrast to the existing studies, we introduce a novel set of features that we use to identify potential criminal activity more accurately. Furthermore, we apply our clustering algorithm to a CoinJoin-adjusted variant of the Bitcoin user graph, which enables us to analyze the network at a more detailed, user-centric level while still offering opportunities to address advanced privacy-enhancing techniques at a later stage. By comparing the results with our ground truth data set, we find that our improved clustering method is able to capture significantly more illicit activity within the most suspicious clusters. Finally, we find that users associated with illegal activities commonly have significant short paths to CoinJoin wallets and show tendencies toward outlier behavior. Our results have potential contributions to anti-money laundering efforts and combating the financing of terrorism and other illegal activities.

Exploring temporal community evolution: algorithmic approaches and parallel optimization for dynamic community detection

Dynamic (temporal) graphs are a convenient mathematical abstraction for many practical complex systems including social contacts, business transactions, and computer communications. Community discovery is an extensively used graph analysis kernel with rich literature for static graphs. However, community discovery in a dynamic setting is challenging for two specific reasons. Firstly, the notion of temporal community lacks a widely accepted formalization, and only limited work exists on understanding how communities emerge over time. Secondly, the added temporal dimension along with the sheer size of modern graph data necessitates new scalable algorithms. In this paper, we investigate how communities evolve over time based on several graph metrics under a temporal formalization. We compare six different algorithmic approaches for dynamic community detection for their quality and runtime. We identify that a vertex-centric (local) optimization method works as efficiently as the classical modularity-based methods. To its advantage, such local computation allows for the efficient design of parallel algorithms without incurring a significant parallel overhead. Based on this insight, we design a shared-memory parallel algorithm DyComPar, which demonstrates between 4 and 18 fold speed-up on a multi-core machine with 20 threads, for several real-world and synthetic graphs from different domains.

A Survey of Malware Analysis Using Community Detection Algorithms

In recent years, we have witnessed an overwhelming and fast proliferation of different types of malware targeting organizations and individuals, which considerably increased the time required to detect malware. The malware developers make this issue worse by spreading many variants of the same malware [ 13 ]. To deal with this issue, graph theory techniques, and particularly community detection algorithms, can be leveraged to achieve bulk detection of malware families and variants to identify malicious communities instead of focusing on the detection of an individual instance of malware, which could significantly reduce the detection time. In this article, we review the state-of-the-art malware analysis solutions that employ community detection algorithms and provide a taxonomy that classifies the solutions with respect to five facets: analysis task, community detection approach, target platform, analysis type, and source of features. We present the solutions with respect to the analysis task, which covers malware detection, malware classification, cyber-threat infrastructure detection, and feature selection. The findings of this survey indicate that there is still room for contributions to further improve the state of the art and address research gaps. Finally, we discuss the advantages and the limitations of the solutions, identify open issues, and provide future research directions.

Spatio-Temporal Characterization of Stochastic Dynamic Transportation Networks

This paper addresses the problem of modeling stochastic dynamic transportation networks, where travel times are random variables with time-varying distributions and spatio-temporal dependencies. It presents a taxonomy of modeling approaches used in the literature and defines extended taxonomic categories to better capture the characteristics of transportation networks. A two-part approach is presented to characterize transportation networks spatially and temporally based on the network structure and observed travel time data. The first part implements a community detection approach from network science modified for the application to transportation networks. The community detection approach is further adapted to use dynamic time warping distance to measure the dissimilarity between time series of link travel times. The second part implements a change point detection approach that identifies points in time when there are changes in the underlying link travel time distributions generating the observed time series. The proposed approach is tested via sensitivity analysis using the large-scale Chicago network and its corresponding travel time data. Sensitivity analysis with varying model parameters demonstrates the robustness of the network characterization and helps determine the most suitable parameter values. The sensitivity analysis with respect to varying weather conditions and demand patterns in the network demonstrates that the spatial and temporal characteristics are robust with respect to changing exogenous and endogenous conditions.

Unraveling the key drivers of community composition in the agri-food trade network

In the complex global food system, the dynamics associated with international food trade have become crucial determinants of food security. In this paper, we employ a community detection approach along with a supervised learning technique to explore the evolution of communities in the agri-food trade network and to identify key factors influencing their composition. By leveraging a large dataset that includes both volume and monetary value of trades, we identify similarities between countries and uncover the primary drivers that shape trade dynamics over time. The analysis also takes into account the impact of evolving climate conditions on food production and trading. The results highlight how the network’s topological structure is continuously evolving, influencing the composition of communities over time. Alongside geographical proximity and geo-political relations, our analysis identifies sustainability, climate and food nutrition aspects as emerging factors that contribute to explaining trade relationships. These findings shed light on the intricate interactions within the global food trade system and provide valuable insights into the factors affecting its stability.

Deep Learning based Densenet Convolution Neural Network for Community Detection in Online Social Networks

Online Social Networks (OSNs) have become increasingly popular, with hundreds of millions of users in recent years. A community in a social network is a virtual group with shared interests and activities that they want to communicate. OSN and the growing number of users have also increased the need for communities. Community structure is an important topological property of OSN and plays an essential role in various dynamic processes, including the diffusion of information within the network. All networks have a community format, and one of the most continually addressed research issues is the finding of communities. However, traditional techniques didn't do a better community of discovering user interests. As a result, these methods cannot detect active communities. To tackle this issues, in this paper presents Densenet Convolution Neural Network (DnetCNN) approach for community detection. Initially, we gather dataset from Kaggle repository. Then preprocessing the dataset to remove inconsistent and missing values. In addition to User Behavior Impact Rate (UBIR) technique to identify the user URL access, key term and page access. After that, Web Crawling Prone Factor Rate (WCPFR) technique is used find the malicious activity random forest and decision method. Furthermore, Spider Web Cluster Community based Feature Selection (SWC2FS) algorithm is used to choose finest attributes in the dataset. Based on the attributes, to find the community group using Densenet Convolution Neural Network (DnetCNN) approach. Thus, the experimental result produce better performance than other methods.

NISQ-Ready Community Detection Based on Separation-Node Identification

The analysis of network structure is essential to many scientific areas ranging from biology to sociology. As the computational task of clustering these networks into partitions, i.e., solving the community detection problem, is generally NP-hard, heuristic solutions are indispensable. The exploration of expedient heuristics has led to the development of particularly promising approaches in the emerging technology of quantum computing. Motivated by the substantial hardware demands for all established quantum community detection approaches, we introduce a novel QUBO-based approach that only needs number-of-nodes qubits and is represented by a QUBO matrix as sparse as the input graph’s adjacency matrix. The substantial improvement in the sparsity of the QUBO matrix, which is typically very dense in related work, is achieved through the novel concept of separation nodes. Instead of assigning every node to a community directly, this approach relies on the identification of a separation-node set, which, upon its removal from the graph, yields a set of connected components, representing the core components of the communities. Employing a greedy heuristic to assign the nodes from the separation-node sets to the identified community cores, subsequent experimental results yield a proof of concept by achieving an up to 95% optimal solution quality on three established real-world benchmark datasets. This work hence displays a promising approach to NISQ-ready quantum community detection, catalyzing the application of quantum computers for the network structure analysis of large-scale, real-world problem instances.

A cost-based multi-layer network approach for the discovery of patient phenotypes

AbstractClinical records frequently include assessments of the characteristics of patients, which may include the completion of various questionnaires. These questionnaires provide a variety of perspectives on a patient’s current state of well-being. Not only is it critical to capture the heterogeneity given by these perspectives, but there is also a growing demand for developing cost-effective technologies for clinical phenotyping. Filling out many questionnaires may be a strain for the patients and therefore, costly. Our goal is then to provide a strategy that refrains from the more expensive questionnaires while maintaining phenotype quality. In this work, we propose COBALT—a cost-based layer selector model for detecting phenotypes using a community detection approach. Our goal is to minimize the number of features used to build these phenotypes while preserving its quality. We test our model using questionnaire data from chronic tinnitus patients and represent the data in a multi-layer network structure. The model is then evaluated by predicting post-treatment data using baseline features (age, gender, and pre-treatment data) as well as the identified phenotypes as a feature. For some post-treatment variables, prediction models using phenotypes from COBALT as features outperformed those using phenotypes detected by traditional clustering methods. Moreover, using phenotype data to predict post-treatment data proved beneficial in comparison with prediction models that were solely trained with baseline features.

Between news and history: identifying networked topics of collective attention on Wikipedia

The digital information landscape has introduced a new dimension to understanding how we collectively react to new information and preserve it at the societal level. This, together with the emergence of platforms such as Wikipedia, has challenged traditional views on the relationship between current events and historical accounts of events, with an ever-shrinking divide between “news” and “history”. Wikipedia’s place as the Internet’s primary reference work thus poses the question of how it represents both traditional encyclopaedic knowledge and evolving important news stories. In other words, how is information on and attention towards current events integrated into the existing topical structures of Wikipedia? To address this, we develop a temporal community detection approach towards topic detection that takes into account both short term dynamics of attention as well as long term article network structures. We apply this method to a dataset of one year of current events on Wikipedia to identify clusters of Wikipedia articles related to news events, distinct from those that would be found solely from page view time series correlations or static network structure. We are able to resolve the topics that more strongly reflect unfolding current events vs more established knowledge by the relative importance of collective attention dynamics vs link structures. We also offer important developments by identifying and describing the emergent topics on Wikipedia. This work provides a means of distinguishing how these information and attention clusters are related to Wikipedia’s twin faces of encyclopaedic knowledge and current events—crucial to understanding the production and consumption of knowledge in the digital age.

Gumbel-SoftMax based graph convolution network approach for community detection

Gumbel-SoftMax based graph convolution network approach for community detection

LazyFox: fast and parallelized overlapping community detection in large graphs.

The detection of communities in graph datasets provides insight about a graph's underlying structure and is an important tool for various domains such as social sciences, marketing, traffic forecast, and drug discovery. While most existing algorithms provide fast approaches for community detection, their results usually contain strictly separated communities. However, most datasets would semantically allow for or even require overlapping communities that can only be determined at much higher computational cost. We build on an efficient algorithm, Fox, that detects such overlapping communities. Fox measures the closeness of a node to a community by approximating the count of triangles which that node forms with that community. We propose LazyFox, a multi-threaded adaptation of the Fox algorithm, which provides even faster detection without an impact on community quality. This allows for the analyses of significantly larger and more complex datasets. LazyFox enables overlapping community detection on complex graph datasets with millions of nodes and billions of edges in days instead of weeks. As part of this work, LazyFox's implementation was published and is available as a tool under an MIT licence at https://github.com/TimGarrels/LazyFox.

Multi-view metro station clustering based on passenger flows: a functional data-edged network community detection approach

Multi-view metro station clustering based on passenger flows: a functional data-edged network community detection approach

An Overlapping Community Detection Approach Based on Deepwalk and Improved Label Propagation

Label propagation-based overlapping community detection algorithms have been widely used in complex networks due to their simplicity and efficiency. However, such algorithms need to randomly choose neighbor nodes and do not fully take the network’s topology into consideration, resulting in low stability and accuracy. Aiming at this problem, we propose an overlapping community detection approach based on DeepWalk and the improved label propagation. We first use the DeepWalk model to learn the network’s topology to obtain low-dimensional vector representations that reflect the spatial location of nodes and construct the weight matrix through vector dot product operation. Then, we design a label propagation algorithm with a preference selection strategy, which can obtain stable overlapping communities by exchanging information with fixed neighbors on the basis of preserving the nodes’ own labels. The experimental results on the real network and synthetic datasets show that the proposed approach has better accuracy and stability than the baseline methods.

A graph theoretic approach to neurodegeneration: five data-driven neuropsychological subtypes in mild cognitive impairment

ABSTRACT Mild cognitive Impairment (MCI) is notoriously heterogenous in terms of clinical presentation, neuroimaging correlates, and subsequent progression. Predicting who will progress to dementia, which type of dementia, and over what timeframe is challenging. Previous work has attempted to identify MCI subtypes using neuropsychological measures in an effort to address this challenge; however, there is no consensus on approach, which may account for some of the variability. Using a hierarchical community detection approach, we examined cognitive subtypes within an MCI sample (from the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative [ADNI] study). We then examined whether these subtypes were related to biomarkers (e.g., cortical volumes, fluorodeoxyglucose (FDG)-positron emission tomography (PET) hypometabolism) or clinical progression. We identified five communities (i.e., cognitive subtypes) within the MCI sample: 1) predominantly memory impairment, 2) predominantly language impairment, 3) cognitively normal, 4) multidomain, with notable executive dysfunction, 5) multidomain, with notable processing speed impairment. Community membership was significantly associated with 1) cortical volume in the hippocampus, entorhinal cortex, and fusiform cortex; 2) FDG PET hypometabolism in the posterior cingulate, angular gyrus, and inferior/middle temporal gyrus; and 3) conversion to dementia at follow up. Overall, community detection as an approach appears a viable method for identifying unique cognitive subtypes in a neurodegenerative sample that were linked to several meaningful biomarkers and modestly with progression at one year follow up.