Stochastic Blockmodels Meets Overlapping Community Detection

Abstract

It turns out that the Stochastic Blockmodel (SBM) and its variants can successfully accomplish a variety of tasks, such as discovering community structures. Note that the main limitations are inferencing high time complexity and poor scalability. Our effort is motivated by the goal of harnessing their complementary strengths to develop a scalability SBM for graphs, that also enjoys an efficient inference process and discovery interpretable communities. Unlike traditional SBM that each node is assumed to belong to just one block, we wish to use the node importance to also infer the community membership(s) of each node (as it is one of the goals of SBMs). To this end, we propose a multi-stage maximum likelihood strategy for inferring the latent parameters of adapting the Stochastic Blockmodels to Overlapping Community Detection (OCD-SBM). The intuitive properties to build the model, is more in line with the real-world network to reveal the hidden community structural characteristics. Particularly, this enables inference of not just the node’s membership into communities, but the strength of the membership in each of the communities the node belongs to. Experiments conducted on various datasets verify the effectiveness of our model.