Highly Efficient Mining of Overlapping Clusters in Signed Weighted Networks

Abstract

In many practical contexts, networks are weighted as their links are assigned numerical weights representing relationship strengths or intensities of inter-node interaction. Moreover, the links' weight can be positive or negative, depending on the relationship or interaction between the connected nodes. The existing methods for network clustering however are not ideal for handling very large signed weighted networks. In this paper, we present a novel method called LPOCSIN (short for "Linear Programming based Overlapping Clustering on Signed Weighted Networks") for efficient mining of overlapping clusters in signed weighted networks. Different from existing methods that rely on computationally expensive cluster cohesiveness measures, LPOCSIN utilizes a simple yet effective one. Using this measure, we transform the cluster assignment problem into a series of alternating linear programs, and further propose a highly efficient procedure for solving those alternating problems. We evaluate LPOCSIN and other state-of-the-art methods by extensive experiments covering a wide range of synthetic and real networks. The experiments show that LPOCSIN significantly outperforms the other methods in recovering ground-truth clusters while being an order of magnitude faster than the most efficient state-of-the-art method.