Reducing Unfairness in Distributed Community Detection

Hao Zhang, Malith Jayaweera, Bin Ren, Yanzhi Wang, Sucheta Soundarajan

Abstract: Big graph data mining and processing have emerged as a crucial area of study. Distributed graph frameworks are commonly employed to process such big graph data in various applications. These frameworks have proven to be highly effective in improving both the accuracy and efficiency of processing large-scale graph data, but little attention has been paid to the algorithmic fairness of such methods. In this paper, we propose a novel graph reweighting algorithm, Homophily-Based Graph Reweighting (HBGR), which can be used with different distributed community detection frameworks. The findings of our study demonstrate that HBGR can significantly enhance the fairness of detected community results, without altering the overall distributed community detection algorithm workflow. Our analysis demonstrates that HBGR outperforms traditional performance-based distributed graph data processing frameworks in terms of fairness across 13 real social network datasets. This enhancement enables us to achieve fairness levels that are comparable, or even superior, to those achieved by linear community detection algorithms while maintaining good efficiency performance. Additionally, we examine the causes of unfairness in distributed community detection algorithms and conduct an interpretability analysis of HBGR's improved fairness performance. Finally, we provide a comprehensive evaluation of the trade-offs between efficiency, accuracy, and fairness in distributed community detection algorithms.

External IDs:dblp:conf/icdm/ZhangJRWS24