Robust Community Detection in Graphs

Community detection in network-type data provides a powerful tool in analyzing and understanding real-world systems. In fact, community detection approaches aim to reduce the network’s dimensionality and partition it into a set of disjoint clusters or communities. However, real networks are usually corrupted with noise or outliers which affect the detected community structure quality. In this paper, a new robust community detection algorithm that is capable of recovering a clean or a smoothed version of the corrupted graph and detecting the correct community structure is introduced. The proposed approach combines robust principal component analysis (RPCA) and symmetric nonnegative matrix factorization (SymNMF) in a single optimization problem. The proposed problem is solved under the framework of alternating direction methods of multipliers (ADMM). In particular, the corrupted adjacency matrix is decomposed into a low-rank and sparse components using RPCA and the community structure is detected by applying SymNMF to the extracted low-rank component. Extensive experiments that have been conducted on real and simulated binary and weighted networks show that the proposed approach significantly outperforms existing algorithms in detecting the correct community structure even in grossly corrupted networks.