Robust and Computationally Feasible Community Detection in the Presence of Arbitrary Outlier Nodes

Loading...
Thumbnail Image
Penn collection
Statistics Papers
Degree type
Discipline
Subject
Robust community detection
SDP relaxation
dual certificate
k-means clustering
Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Funder
Grant number
License
Copyright date
Distributor
Related resources
Author
Cai, Tony
Li, Xiaodong
Contributor
Abstract

Community detection, which aims to cluster NN nodes in a given graph into rr distinct groups based on the observed undirected edges, is an important problem in network data analysis. In this paper, the popular stochastic block model (SBM) is extended to the generalized stochastic block model (GSBM) that allows for adversarial outlier nodes, which are connected with the other nodes in the graph in an arbitrary way. Under this model, we introduce a procedure using convex optimization followed by k-means algorithm with k=r. Both theoretical and numerical properties of the method are analyzed. A theoretical guarantee is given for the procedure to accurately detect the communities with small misclassification rate under the setting where the number of clusters can grow with N. This theoretical result admits to the best-known result in the literature of computationally feasible community detection in SBM without outliers. Numerical results show that our method is both computationally fast and robust to different kinds of outliers, while some popular computationally fast community detection algorithms, such as spectral clustering applied to adjacency matrices or graph Laplacians, may fail to retrieve the major clusters due to a small portion of outliers. We apply a slight modification of our method to a political blogs data set, showing that our method is competent in practice and comparable to existing computationally feasible methods in the literature. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, our result is the first in the literature in terms of clustering communities with fast growing numbers under the GSBM where a portion of arbitrary outlier nodes exist.

Advisor
Date Range for Data Collection (Start Date)
Date Range for Data Collection (End Date)
Digital Object Identifier
Series name and number
Publication date
2015-01-01
Journal title
The Annals of Statistics
Volume number
Issue number
Publisher
Publisher DOI
Journal Issue
Comments
Recommended citation
Collection