Scalable Inference of Overlapping Communities

Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 25 (NIPS 2012)

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Authors

Prem K. Gopalan, Sean Gerrish, Michael Freedman, David Blei, David Mimno

Abstract

We develop a scalable algorithm for posterior inference of overlapping communities in large networks. Our algorithm is based on stochastic variational inference in the mixed-membership stochastic blockmodel. It naturally interleaves subsampling the network with estimating its community structure. We apply our algorithm on ten large, real-world networks with up to 60,000 nodes. It converges several orders of magnitude faster than the state-of-the-art algorithm for MMSB, finds hundreds of communities in large real-world networks, and detects the true communities in 280 benchmark networks with equal or better accuracy compared to other scalable algorithms.