Variational Approach for Learning Community Structures

Discovering and modeling community structure exist to be a fundamentally challenging task. In domains such as biology, chemistry, and physics, researchers often rely on community detection algorithms to uncover community structures from complex systems yet no unified definition of community structure exists. Furthermore, existing models tend to be oversimplified leading to a neglect of richer information such as nodal features. Coupled with the surge of user generated information on social networks, a demand for newer techniques beyond traditional approaches is inevitable. Deep learning techniques such as network representation learning have shown tremendous promise. More specifically, supervised and semisupervised learning tasks such as link prediction and node classification have achieved remarkable results. However, unsupervised learning tasks such as community detection remain widely unexplored. In this paper, a novel deep generative model for community detection is proposed. Extensive experiments show that the proposed model, empowered with Bayesian deep learning, can provide insights in terms of uncertainty and exploit nonlinearities which result in better performance in comparison to state-of-the-art community detection methods. Additionally, unlike traditional methods, the proposed model is community structure definition agnostic. Leveraging on low-dimensional embeddings of both network topology and feature similarity, it automatically learns the best model configuration for describing similarities in a community.