A Unified Semi-Supervised Community Detection Framework Using Latent Space Graph Regularization

Community structure is one of the most important properties of complex networks and is a foundational concept in exploring and understanding networks. In real world, topology information alone is often inadequate to accurately find community structure due to its sparsity and noises. However, potential useful prior information can be obtained from domain knowledge in many applications. Thus, how to improve the community detection performance by combining network topology with prior information becomes an interesting and challenging problem. Previous efforts on utilizing such priors are either dedicated or insufficient. In this paper, we firstly present a unified interpretation to a group of existing community detection methods. And then based on this interpretation, we propose a unified semi-supervised framework to integrate network topology with prior information for community detection. If the prior information indicates that some nodes belong to the same community, we encode it by adding a graph regularization term to penalize the latent space dissimilarity of these nodes. This framework can be applied to many widely-used matrix-based community detection methods satisfying our interpretation, such as nonnegative matrix factorization, spectral clustering, and their variants. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real networks show that the proposed framework significantly improves the accuracy of community detection, especially on networks with unclear structures.