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An attentional-walk-based autoencoder for community detection

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Abstract

The purpose of community detection is to discover closely connected groups of entities in complex networks such as interest groups, proteins and vehicles in social, biological and transportation networks. Recently, autoencoders have become a popular technique to extract nonlinear relationships between nodes by learning their representation vectors through an encoder-decoder neural structure, which is beneficial to discovering communities with vague boundaries. However, most of the existing autoencoders take restoring a network’s adjacency matrix as their objective, which puts emphasis on the first-order relationships between the nodes and neglects their higher-order relationships that may be more useful for community detection. In this paper, we propose a novel attentional-walk-based autoencoder (AWBA) which integrates random walk considering attentional coefficients between each pair of nodes into the encoder to mine their high-order relationships. First, the attention layers are added to the encoder to learn the influence of a node’s different neighbors on it in encoding. Second, we develop a new random walk strategy that embeds the attention coefficients and the community membership of the nodes obtained by a seed-expansion-based clustering algorithm into the computation of the transition probability matrix to instill both low and high order relationships between the nodes into the representation vectors. The experimental results on synthetic and real-world networks verify the superiority of our algorithm over the baseline algorithms.

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Notes

  1. The source code of AWBA, the competitor algorithms, the LFR tool and the evaluation metrics are available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/awba-0C48.

  2. The networks were put at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/community-detection-datasets-5D1F.

  3. The source code of AWBA, the competitor algorithms, the LFR tool and the evaluation metrics are available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/awba-0C48.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Computer and Data Science, Fuzhou University, 2 Xue Yuan Road, University Town, Fuzhou, Fujian Province, 350108, China

    Kun Guo, Peng Zhang, Wenzhong Guo & Yuzhong Chen

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  1. Kun Guo
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  2. Peng Zhang
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Guo, K., Zhang, P., Guo, W. et al. An attentional-walk-based autoencoder for community detection. Appl Intell 53, 11505–11523 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10489-021-02957-4

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