Semi-Supervised Community Detection via Constraint Matrix Construction and Active Node Selection

Identification of community structures is essential for characterizing and analyzing complex networks. Having focusing primarily on network topological structures, most existing methods for community detection ignore two types of non-topological relationships among nodes, i.e., pairwise “must-link” constraints among pairs of nodes and labels of nodes, such as functions they may have. Here, we present a novel semi-supervised and active learning method for community detection to integrate these two types of information of a network so as to increase the accuracy of community identification. Our new method will honor the “must-link” relationship without introducing new parameters and is efficient with a guaranteed convergence. An essential component of the method is a linear representation that is particularly suited to an active learning to help select the most critical nodes that impact community discovery. We present results from extensive experiments on synthetic and real networks to show the superior performance of the new methods over the existing approaches.