The modern science of networks has brought significant advances to our understanding of complex systems. One of the most relevant features of graphs representing real systems is community structure, or clustering, i. e. the organization of vertices in clusters, with many edges joining vertices of the same cluster and comparatively few edges joining vertices of different clusters. Such clusters, or communities, can be considered as fairly independent compartments of a graph, playing a similar role like, e. g., the tissues or the organs in the human body. Detecting communities is of great importance in sociology, biology and computer science, disciplines where systems are often represented as graphs. This problem is very hard and not yet satisfactorily solved, despite the huge effort of a large interdisciplinary community of scientists working on it over the past few years. We will attempt a thorough exposition of the topic, from the definition of the main elements of the problem, to the presentation of most methods developed, with a special focus on techniques designed by statistical physicists, from the discussion of crucial issues like the significance of clustering and how methods should be tested and compared against each other, to the description of applications to real networks.

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Community detection in graphs

Similarity search is a primitive operation in database and Web search engines. With the advent of large-scale heterogeneous information networks that consist of multi-typed, interconnected objects, such as the bibliographic networks and social media networks, it is important to study similarity search in such networks. Intuitively, two objects are similar if they are linked by many paths in the network. However, most existing similarity measures are defined for homogeneous networks. Different semantic meanings behind paths are not taken into consideration. Thus they cannot be directly applied to heterogeneous networks.In this paper, we study similarity search that is defined among the same type of objects in heterogeneous networks. Moreover, by considering different linkage paths in a network, one could derive various similarity semantics. Therefore, we introduce the concept of meta path-based similarity, where a meta path is a path consisting of a sequence of relations defined between different object types (i.e., structural paths at the meta level). No matter whether a user would like to explicitly specify a path combination given sufficient domain knowledge, or choose the best path by experimental trials, or simply provide training examples to learn it, meta path forms a common base for a network-based similarity search engine. In particular, under the meta path framework we define a novel similarity measure called PathSim that is able to find peer objects in the network (e.g., find authors in the similar field and with similar reputation), which turns out to be more meaningful in many scenarios compared with random-walk based similarity measures. In order to support fast online query processing for PathSim queries, we develop an efficient solution that partially materializes short meta paths and then concatenates them online to compute top-k results. Experiments on real data sets demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed paradigm.

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PathSim: meta path-based top-K similarity search in heterogeneous information networks

Graphs, such as social networks, word co-occurrence networks, and communication networks, occur naturally in various real-world applications. Analyzing them yields insight into the structure of society, language, and different patterns of communication. Many approaches have been proposed to perform the analysis. Recently, methods which use the representation of graph nodes in vector space have gained traction from the research community. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive and structured analysis of various graph embedding techniques proposed in the literature. We first introduce the embedding task and its challenges such as scalability, choice of dimensionality, and features to be preserved, and their possible solutions. We then present three categories of approaches based on factorization methods, random walks, and deep learning, with examples of representative algorithms in each category and analysis of their performance on various tasks. We evaluate these state-of-the-art methods on a few common datasets and compare their performance against one another. Our analysis concludes by suggesting some potential applications and future directions. We finally present the open-source Python library we developed, named GEM (Graph Embedding Methods, available at https://github.com/palash1992/GEM ), which provides all presented algorithms within a unified interface to foster and facilitate research on the topic.

Graph embedding techniques, applications, and performance: A survey

At SIGMOD 2015, an article was presented with the title “DBSCAN Revisited: Mis-Claim, Un-Fixability, and Approximation” that won the conference’s best paper award. In this technical correspondence, we want to point out some inaccuracies in the way DBSCAN was represented, and why the criticism should have been directed at the assumption about the performance of spatial index structures such as R-trees and not at an algorithm that can use such indexes. We will also discuss the relationship of DBSCAN performance and the indexability of the dataset, and discuss some heuristics for choosing appropriate DBSCAN parameters. Some indicators of bad parameters will be proposed to help guide future users of this algorithm in choosing parameters such as to obtain both meaningful results and good performance. In new experiments, we show that the new SIGMOD 2015 methods do not appear to offer practical benefits if the DBSCAN parameters are well chosen and thus they are primarily of theoretical interest. In conclusion, the original DBSCAN algorithm with effective indexes and reasonably chosen parameter values performs competitively compared to the method proposed by Gan and Tao.

DBSCAN Revisited, Revisited: Why and How You Should (Still) Use DBSCAN

Network clustering (or graph partitioning) is an important task for the discovery of underlying structures in networks. Many algorithms find clusters by maximizing the number of intra-cluster edges. While such algorithms find useful and interesting structures, they tend to fail to identify and isolate two kinds of vertices that play special roles - vertices that bridge clusters (hubs) and vertices that are marginally connected to clusters (outliers). Identifying hubs is useful for applications such as viral marketing and epidemiology since hubs are responsible for spreading ideas or disease. In contrast, outliers have little or no influence, and may be isolated as noise in the data. In this paper, we proposed a novel algorithm called SCAN (Structural Clustering Algorithm for Networks), which detects clusters, hubs and outliers in networks. It clusters vertices based on a structural similarity measure. The algorithm is fast and efficient, visiting each vertex only once. An empirical evaluation of the method using both synthetic and real datasets demonstrates superior performance over other methods such as the modularity-based algorithms.

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SCAN: a structural clustering algorithm for networks

Graph partitioning, or network clustering, is an essential research problem in many areas. Current approaches, however, have difficulty splitting two clusters that are densely connected by one or more "hub" vertices. Further, traditional methods are less able to deal with very confused structures. In this paper we propose a novel similarity-based definition of the quality of a partitioning of a graph. Through theoretical analysis and experimental results we demonstrate that the proposed definition largely overcomes the "hub" problem and outperforms existing approaches on complicated graphs. In addition, we show that this definition can be used with fast agglomerative algorithms to find communities in very large networks.

A novel similarity-based modularity function for graph partitioning

Many systems in sciences, engineering and nature can be modeled as networks. Examples include the internet, WWW and social networks. Finding hidden structures is important for making sense of complex networked data. In this paper we present a new network clustering method that can find clusters in an agglomerative fashion using structural similarity of vertices in the given network. Experiments conducted on real datasets demonstrate promising performance of the new method.

AHSCAN: Agglomerative Hierarchical Structural Clustering Algorithm for Networks

Many systems in sciences, engineering and nature can be modeled as networks. Examples are internet, metabolic networks and social networks. Network clustering algorithms aimed to find hidden structures from networks are important to make sense of complex networked data. In this paper we present a new clustering method for networks. The proposed algorithm can find hierarchical structure of clusters without requiring any input parameters. The experiments using real data demonstrate an outstanding performance of the new method.

A Divisive Hierarchical Structural Clustering Algorithm for Networks

Containing much valuable information, networks such as the World Wide Web, social networks and metabolic networks draw increasingly attention in scientific communities. Network clustering (or graph partitioning) is the discovery of underlying clusters of related vertices in networks. But beyond organizing vertices into clusters of peers is the question of what role each vertex play in the network. This paper presents some new ways of uncovering underlying structures, including the roles that vertices play in the network. Identifying vertex roles is useful for applications such as viral marketing and epidemiology. For example, hubs are responsible for spreading ideas or disease. We applied our algorithm to analyze some real networks. The results demonstrate a superior performance over other methods such as modularity-based algorithms.

Thomas A. J. Schweiger

Papers

SCAN: a structural clustering algorithm for networks

A novel similarity-based modularity function for graph partitioning

AHSCAN: Agglomerative Hierarchical Structural Clustering Algorithm for Networks

A Divisive Hierarchical Structural Clustering Algorithm for Networks

On Structural Analysis of Large Networks