Using Deep Learning for Community Discovery in Social Networks

Community detection is an important task in social network analysis. Existing methods typically use the topological information alone, and ignore the rich information available in the content data. Recently, some researchers have noticed that user profiles can also benefit to community detection, and hence the combination of topology and node contents has become a new hot topic. Some methods using both topology and content have been proposed. However, they often suffer from two drawbacks: 1) they cannot extract a potential deep representation of the network; 2) they cannot automatically weight different information sources with adequate balance parameters. To overcome these issues, we propose a deep integration representation (DIR) algorithm via deep joint reconstruction, which is motivated by the similarity between deep feedforward auto-encoders and spectral clustering in terms of matrix reconstruction. Thanks to spectral clustering which is one of the best community detection methods, the proposed new method is also good at community discovery task. In addition, DIR has further benefit because it not only provides a nonlinear and deep representation of the network, but also learns the most suitable balance between different components automatically. We compare the proposed new approach with nine state-of-the-art community detection methods on eight real relatively large networks. The experimental results show the definite superiority of this new approach.