Link-Prediction Enhanced Consensus Clustering for Complex Networks

TL;DR

This paper introduces a consensus clustering method that improves community detection in incomplete networks by combining link prediction and multiple community detection outputs, significantly enhancing accuracy.

Contribution

It presents a novel framework that integrates link prediction with consensus clustering to improve community detection on incomplete networks, outperforming existing methods.

Findings

Boosts community detection accuracy by 7% on artificial data.

Enhances performance by 17% on Facebook ego networks.

Effective in handling incomplete network data.

Abstract

Many real networks that are inferred or collected from data are incomplete due to missing edges. Missing edges can be inherent to the dataset (Facebook friend links will never be complete) or the result of sampling (one may only have access to a portion of the data). The consequence is that downstream analyses that consume the network will often yield less accurate results than if the edges were complete. Community detection algorithms, in particular, often suffer when critical intra-community edges are missing. We propose a novel consensus clustering algorithm to enhance community detection on incomplete networks. Our framework utilizes existing community detection algorithms that process networks imputed by our link prediction based algorithm. The framework then merges their multiple outputs into a final consensus output. On average our method boosts performance of existing algorithms by 7% on artificial data and 17% on ego networks collected from Facebook.