WIAS Preprint No. 2951, (2022)

Adaptive weights community detection



Authors

  • Besold, Franz
  • Spokoiny, Vladimir
    ORCID: 0000-0002-2040-3427

2020 Mathematics Subject Classification

  • 62H30 62G10

Keywords

  • Adaptive weights, community detection, stochastic block model

DOI

10.20347/WIAS.PREPRINT.2951

Abstract

Due to the technological progress of the last decades, Community Detection has become a major topic in machine learning. However, there is still a huge gap between practical and theoretical results, as theoretically optimal procedures often lack a feasible implementation and vice versa. This paper aims to close this gap and presents a novel algorithm that is both numerically and statistically efficient. Our procedure uses a test of homogeneity to compute adaptive weights describing local communities. The approach was inspired by the Adaptive Weights Community Detection (AWCD) algorithm by [2]. This algorithm delivered some promising results on artificial and real-life data, but our theoretical analysis reveals its performance to be suboptimal on a stochastic block model. In particular, the involved estimators are biased and the procedure does not work for sparse graphs. We propose significant modifications, addressing both shortcomings and achieving a nearly optimal rate of strong consistency on the stochastic block model. Our theoretical results are illustrated and validated by numerical experiments.

Download Documents