Community detection in sparse time-evolving graphs with a dynamical Bethe-Hessian

Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 33 (NeurIPS 2020)

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Authors

Lorenzo Dall'Amico, Romain Couillet, Nicolas Tremblay

Abstract

This article considers the problem of community detection in sparse dynamical graphs in which the community structure evolves over time. A fast spectral algorithm based on an extension of the Bethe-Hessian matrix is proposed, which benefits from the positive correlation in the class labels and in their temporal evolution and is designed to be applicable to any dynamical graph with a community structure. Under the dynamical degree-corrected stochastic block model, in the case of two classes of equal size, we demonstrate and support with extensive simulations that our proposed algorithm is capable of making non-trivial community reconstruction as soon as theoretically possible, thereby reaching the optimal detectability threshold and provably outperforming competing spectral methods.