The power of certainty: A dirichlet-multinomial model for belief propagation

Abstract

Given a friendship network, how certain are we that Smith is a progressive (vs. conservative)? How can we propagate these certainties through the network? While Belief propagation marked the beginning of principled label-propagation to classify nodes in a graph, its numerous variants proposed in the literature fail to take into account uncertainty during the propagation process. As we show, this limitation leads to counter-intuitive results for even simple graphs. Motivated by these observations, we formalize axioms that any node classification algorithm should obey and propose NetConf which satisfies these axioms and handles arbitrary network effects (homophily/heterophily) at scale. Our contributions are: (1) Axioms: We state axioms that any node classification algorithm should satisfy; (2) Theory: NetConf is grounded in a Bayesian-theoretic framework to model uncertainties, has a closed-form solution and comes with precise convergence guarantees; (3) Practice: Our method is easy to implement and scales linearly with the number of edges in the graph. On experiments using real world data, we always match or outperform BP while taking less processing time.