Community detection by popularity based models for authored networked data

Abstract

Community detection has emerged as an attractive topic due to the increasing need to understand and manage the networked data of tremendous magnitude. Networked data usually consists of links between the entities and the attributes for describing the entities. Various approaches have been proposed for detecting communities by utilizing the link information and/or attribute information. In this work, we study the problem of community detection for networked data with additional authorship information. By authorship, each entity in the network is authored by another type of entities (e.g., wiki pages are edited by users, products are purchased by customers), to which we refer as authors. Communities of entities are affected by their authors, e.g., two entities that are associated with the same author tend to belong to the same community. Therefore leveraging the authorship information would help us better detect the communities in the networked data. However, it also brings new challenges to community detection. The foremost question is how to model the correlation between communities and authorships. In this work, we address this question by proposing probabilistic models based on the popularity link model [1], which is demonstrated to yield encouraging results for community detection. We employ two methods for modeling the authorships: (i) the first one generates the authorships independently from links by community memberships and popularities of authors by analogy of the popularity link model; (ii) the second one models the links between entities based on authorships together with community memberships and popularities of nodes, which is an analog of previous author-topic model. Upon the basic models, we explore several extensions including (i) we model the community memberships of authors by that of their authored entities to reduce the number of redundant parameters; and (ii) we model the communities memberships of entities and/or authors by their attributes using a discriminative approach. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed models by empirical studies.