Mining Community Structures in Multidimensional Networks

We investigate the problem of community detection in multidimensional networks, that is, networks where entities engage in various interaction types (dimensions) simultaneously. While some approaches have been proposed to identify community structures in multidimensional networks, there are a number of problems still to solve. In fact, the majority of the proposed approaches suffer from one or even more of the following limitations: (1) difficulty detecting communities in networks characterized by the presence of many irrelevant dimensions, (2) lack of systematic procedures to explicitly identify the relevant dimensions of each community, and (3) dependence on a set of user-supplied parameters, including the number of communities, that require a proper tuning. Most of the existing approaches are inadequate for dealing with these three issues in a unified framework. In this paper, we develop a novel approach that is capable of addressing the aforementioned limitations in a single framework. The proposed approach allows automated identification of communities and their sub-dimensional spaces using a novel objective function and a constrained label propagation-based optimization strategy. By leveraging the relevance of dimensions at the node level, the strategy aims to maximize the number of relevant within-community links while keeping track of the most relevant dimensions. A notable feature of the proposed approach is that it is able to automatically identify low dimensional community structures embedded in a high dimensional space. Experiments on synthetic and real multidimensional networks illustrate the suitability of the new method.