Speaker: Zhong-Yuan Zhang

Title: Semi-Supervised Community Structure Detection in Social Networks Based on Matrix De-noising

Date: 10/15/2012

Time: 1pm

Room: Informatics East 122

Abstract: Constrained clustering has been well-studied in the unsupervised learning society. However, how to encode constraints into community detection process of the complex social networks remains a challenging problem. We propose a semi-supervised learning framework for community structure detection. This framework implicitly encodes the must-link and cannot-link constraints by modifying the adjacency matrix of the network, which can also be regarded as the de-noising process of the consensus matrix of the community structures. Our proposed method gives consideration to both the topology and the functions (background information) of the complex network, which improves the interpretability of the results. The comparisons performed on the synthetic benchmarks and the real-world networks show that the framework can significantly improve the detection performance with few constraints, which makes it an attractive methodology in the analysis of complex social networks.