Clustering and

Community Formation/
Structure
Diego Pinheiro Silva

A. Vespignani. GLEAM: Global Epidemic and Mobility Model. http://www.gleamviz.org/

Network properties
What properties of networked system can we measure or model and
how are those properties related to the practical issues we care about?

Common properties in many

networks
small-world
properties

network transitivity

Is there anything
else?

power-law degree
distributions

community structure

What if this network represent:

students at university;

friendship at gym;

blogosphere;

coauthorships in a university
department.
tool for analysis and
understand of network
data

Newman, M. Networks. (Oxford University Press, 2010)

Community structure
!

Clusters, communities,
cohesive groups or
modules

pattern of edges
relatively weakly
interconnected modules

Newman, M. E. J. Detecting community structure in networks. Eur.

Phys. J. B - Condens. Matter 38, 321330 (2004).

Community structure
social network

real social grouping by interest

or background

citation network

related papers on a single topic

metabolic network

cycles or other functional

grouping

metabolic network

pages on related topics

Problem
variable
current value
spread of
diseases

variables on
the vertices
neighboring
vertices

parallel computer

minimize interprocessor communication

Cluster finding
specified

graph
partitioning

not specified

community
detection

number
and size
of the
groups

Cluster finding

find the best division of a network

graph
partitioning

regardless of whether
any good division
exists

community
detection

no need to divide if no
good exists

Graph partitioning
two nonoverlapping
groups

graph
bisection

given sizes

cut size is minimized

Newman, M. Networks. (Oxford University Press, 2010)

graph partitioning
exhaustive search

Number of ways
!

Roughly exponential
!

intractable computation when

n go much beyond 30

Newman, M. Networks. (Oxford University Press, 2010)

Kernighan-Lin Algorithm
Dividing into 2 groups of
required size
(i,j) interchange influence
find (i,j) with the largest cut
size reduction
swap (i,j)
choose the state with the
smallest cut size value
among all swapping
procedure

Newman, M. Networks. (Oxford University Press, 2010)

Community detection
natural divisions

Community
detection

many edges within

groups
few edges
between groups

Community Detection
minimum cut size

ratio cut partitioning

without group size

constraint

natural
divisions?

eliminates the
problem of all
vertices in the
same group

biases the
solution towards
roughly equally
sized groups

How to measure the quality

of a division?
is the cut size a good
measure?

edges between communities

few edges

fewer than
expected

number of edges
within groups

How to measure the quality

of a division?
number of edges
within groups
what about
assortative mixing?

Related to

number os such edges

expected in a basis of
chance

Assortative Mixing
Modularity
many more edges in a
network

fall between vertices of the

same type

than one would expect by

chance

high value

Simple Modularity
Maximization
Dividing into 2 equally
sized groups
vertex i interchange
influence according to
modularity
find i with the largest
modularity
move i

choose the state with the

highest modularity value
among all movements

Newman, M. Networks. (Oxford University Press, 2010)

Community Detection
addition

agglomerative

removal

divisive

Technique

Agglomerative
Calculate similarities
between vertex pairs

dendogram

Assign each vertex to a

group of its own
Join together the pairs of
groups with the highest
similarities
recalculate similarities
Newman, M. & Girvan, M. Finding and evaluating community
structure in networks. Phys. Rev. E 69, 026113 (2004).

Agglomerative
good at discovering the
strongly linked cores of
communities
tend to leave out
peripheral vertices

Newman, M. & Girvan, M. Finding and evaluating community structure in networks.

Phys. Rev. E 69, 026113 (2004).

Divisive
Start with network of interest

dendogram

Compute similarity between

all edges
remove the edge with the
lowest similarity
Recalculate similarities
Newman, M. & Girvan, M. Finding and evaluating community
structure in networks. Phys. Rev. E 69, 026113 (2004).

highest betweenness

Similarities

Pearson coefficients

Euclidean distance

Cosine similarity

flexibility

answers depending on
the measures

Cosine similarity

Common neighbors
!

Cosine of the angle

!
!

Dot product of two

rows
!

unweighted simple
graph

Cosine similarity

Varol, O., Ferrara, E., Ogan, C. L., Menczer, F., & Flammini, A. (2014). Evolution of online user behavior during a social upheaval. In
Proceedings of the 2014 ACM conference on Web science - WebSci 14 (pp. 8190). New York, New York, USA: ACM Press. doi:
10.1145/2615569.2615699

clusters matched geopolitical profiles

Gezi Park movement in Turkey

Borge-Holthoefer, J., Rivero, A., Garca, I., Cauh, E., Ferrer, A.,
Ferrer, D., Moreno, Y. (2011). Structural and dynamical patterns
on online social networks: the Spanish May 15th movement as a
case study. PloS One, 6(8), e23883. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.
0023883

social aspects
May 15th movement (15M) in Spain

Conclusions

References

I appreciate the opportunity. Thank you for

your time..

Diego Pinheiro