A Spin-Glass Model for Semi-Supervised Community Detection

Abstract

Current modularity-based community detection methods show decreased performance as relational networks become increasingly noisy. These methods also yield a large number of diverse community structures as solutions, which is problematic for applications that impose constraints on the acceptable solutions or in cases where the user is focused on specific communities of interest. To address both of these problems, we develop a semi-supervised spin-glass model that enables current community detection methods to incorporate background knowledge in the forms of individual labels and pairwise constraints. Unlike current methods, our approach shows robust performance in the presence of noise in the relational network, and the ability to guide the discovery process toward specific community structures. We evaluate our algorithm on several benchmark networks and a new political sentiment network representing cooperative events between nations that was mined from news articles over six years.