Community detection with attributed random walk via seed replacement

Community detection methods based on random walks are widely adopted in various network analysis tasks. It could capture structures and attributed information while alleviating the issues of noises. Though random walks on plain networks have been studied before, in real-world networks, nodes are often not pure vertices, but own different characteristics, described by the rich set of data associated with them. These node attributes contain plentiful information that often complements the network, and bring opportunities to the random-walk-based analysis. However, node attributes make the node interactions more complicated and are heterogeneous with respect to topological structures. Accordingly, attributed community detection based on random walk is challenging as it requires joint modelling of graph structures and node attributes. To bridge this gap, we propose a Community detection with Attributed random walk via Seed replacement (CAS). Our model is able to conquer the limitation of directly utilize the original network topology and ignore the attribute information. In particular, the algorithm consists of four stages to better identify communities. (1) Select initial seed nodes in the network; (2) Capture the better-quality seed replacement path set; (3) Generate the structure-attribute interaction transition matrix and perform the colored random walk; (4) Utilize the parallel conductance to expand the communities. Experiments on synthetic and real-world networks demonstrate the effectiveness of CAS.

Automated summary

Community detection methods based on random walks are widely used in network analysis tasks. However, in real-world networks, nodes have different attributes, which make the detection more challenging. To address this issue, the paper proposes a community detection method called CAS based on attributed random walk, which is demonstrated to be effective through experiments.