CONE: Community Oriented Network Embedding

TL;DR

This paper introduces CONE, a supervised network embedding method that leverages limited ground-truth communities to better capture social patterns and improve community detection over traditional heuristic-based methods.

Contribution

It proposes a novel supervised embedding approach combining neural networks and random walks to incorporate social patterns from limited labeled communities.

Findings

Supervised embeddings outperform heuristic-based methods in community detection.

The model effectively captures social patterns from limited ground-truth data.

Enhanced community detection accuracy demonstrated on real-world networks.

Abstract

Detecting communities has long been popular in the research on networks. It is usually modeled as an unsupervised clustering problem on graphs, based on heuristic assumptions about community characteristics, such as edge density and node homogeneity. In this work, we doubt the universality of these widely adopted assumptions and compare human labeled communities with machine predicted ones obtained via various mainstream algorithms. Based on supportive results, we argue that communities are defined by various social patterns and unsupervised learning based on heuristics is incapable of capturing all of them. Therefore, we propose to inject supervision into community detection through Community Oriented Network Embedding (CONE), which leverages limited ground-truth communities as examples to learn an embedding model aware of the social patterns underlying them. Specifically, a deep architecture is developed by combining recurrent neural networks with random-walks on graphs towards capturing social patterns directed by ground-truth communities. Generic clustering algorithms on the embeddings of other nodes produced by the learned model then effectively reveals more communities that share similar social patterns with the ground-truth ones.