Improving Stochastic Block Models by Incorporating Power-Law Degree Characteristic

Improving Stochastic Block Models by Incorporating Power-Law Degree Characteristic

Maoying Qiao, Jun Yu, Wei Bian, Qiang Li, Dacheng Tao

Proceedings of the Twenty-Sixth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main track. Pages 2620-2626. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2017/365

Stochastic block models (SBMs) provide a statistical way modeling network data, especially in representing clusters or community structures. However, most block models do not consider complex characteristics of networks such as scale-free feature, making them incapable of handling degree variation of vertices, which is ubiquitous in real networks. To address this issue, we introduce degree decay variables into SBM, termed power-law degree SBM (PLD-SBM), to model the varying probability of connections between node pairs. The scale-free feature is approximated by a power-law degree characteristic. Such a property allows PLD-SBM to correct the distortion of degree distribution in SBM, and thus improves the performance of cluster prediction. Experiments on both simulated networks and two real-world networks including the Adolescent Health Data and the political blogs network demonstrate the validity of the motivation of PLD-SBM, and its practical superiority.
Keywords:
Machine Learning: Data Mining
Machine Learning: Learning Graphical Models
Machine Learning: Unsupervised Learning