Robust Dynamic Clustering for Temporal Networks

Jingyi You, Chenlong Hu, Hidetaka Kamigaito, Kotaro Funakoshi, Manabu Okumura

Abstract: Dynamic community detection (or graph clustering) in temporal networks has attracted much attention because it is promising for revealing the underlying mechanism of complex real-world systems. Current methods are criticized for the independence of graph representation learning and graph clustering, considerable noise during temporal information smoothing, and high time complexity. We propose a R obust T emporal S moothing C lustering method (RTSC), which involves joint graph representation learning and graph clustering, to solve these problems. RTSC can be formulated as a constrained multi-objective optimization problem. Specifically, three-order successive snapshots are first projected into the same subspace via graph embedding. We then use the embedding matrices to learn a common low-rank block-diagonal matrix that contains current clustering information and specific noise matrices with a sparse constraint to remove noise at each time step. To efficiently solve the challenging optimization problem, we also propose an optimization procedure based on the augmented Lagrangian multiplier (ALM) scheme. Experimental results on six artificial datasets and four real-world dynamic network datasets indicate that RTSC performs better than six state-of-the-art algorithms for dynamic clustering in temporal networks.