Modeling with Node Popularities for Autonomous Overlapping Community Detection

Overlapping community detection has triggered recent research in network analysis. One of the promising techniques for finding overlapping communities is the popular stochastic models, which, unfortunately, have some common drawbacks. They do not support an important observation that highly connected nodes are more likely to reside in the overlapping regions of communities in the network. These methods are in essence not truly unsupervised, since they require a threshold on probabilistic memberships to derive overlapping structures and need the number of communities to be specified a priori. We develop a new method to address these issues for overlapping community detection. We first present a stochastic model to accommodate the relative importance and the expected degree of every node in each community. We then infer every overlapping community by ranking the nodes according to their importance. Second, we determine the number of communities under the Bayesian framework. We evaluate our method and compare it with five state-of-the-art methods. The results demonstrate the superior performance of our method. We also apply this new method to two applications, showing its superb performance on practical problems.