CONE: Community Oriented Network Embedding

Detecting communities has long been popular in the research on networks. It is usually modeled as an unsupervised clustering problem on graphs, based on heuristic assumptions about community characteristics, such as edge density and node homogeneity. In this work, we doubt the universality of these widely adopted assumptions and compare human labeled communities with machine predicted ones obtained via various mainstream algorithms. Based on supportive results, we argue that communities are defined by various social patterns and unsupervised learning based on heuristics is incapable of capturing all of them. Therefore, we propose to inject supervision into community detection through Community Oriented Network Embedding (CONE), which leverages limited ground-truth communities as examples to learn an embedding model aware of the social patterns underlying them. Specifically, a deep architecture is developed by combining recurrent neural networks with randomwalks on graphs towards capturing social patterns directed by ground-truth communities. Generic clustering algorithms on the embeddings of other nodes produced by the learned model then effectively reveals more communities that share similar social patterns with the ground-truth ones.