학술논문

Recovering Asymmetric Communities in the Stochastic Block Model
Document Type
Periodical
Source
IEEE Transactions on Network Science and Engineering IEEE Trans. Netw. Sci. Eng. Network Science and Engineering, IEEE Transactions on. 5(3):237-246 Sep, 2018
Subject
Communication, Networking and Broadcast Technologies
Computing and Processing
Components, Circuits, Devices and Systems
Signal Processing and Analysis
Stochastic processes
Computational modeling
Digital TV
Optimized production technology
Belief propagation
Algorithm design and analysis
Random variables
Network theory
communities
network clustering
message-passing algorithms
statistical learning
Language
ISSN
2327-4697
2334-329X
Abstract
We consider the sparse stochastic block model in the case where the degrees are uninformative. The case where the two communities have approximately the same size has been extensively studied and we concentrate here on the community detection problem in the case of unbalanced communities. In this setting, spectral algorithms based on the non-backtracking matrix are known to solve the community detection problem (i.e., do strictly better than a random guess) when the signal is sufficiently large namely above the so-called Kesten-Stigum threshold. In this regime and when the average degree tends to infinity, we show that if the community of a vanishing fraction of the vertices is revealed, then a local algorithm (belief propagation) is optimal down to Kesten-Stigum threshold and we quantify explicitly its performance. Below the Kesten-Stigum threshold, we show that, in the large degree limit, there is a second threshold called the spinodal curve below which, the community detection problem is not solvable. The spinodal curve is equal to the Kesten-Stigum threshold when the fraction of vertices in the smallest community is above $p^*=\frac{1}{2}-\frac{1}{2\sqrt{3}}$ , so that the Kesten-Stigum threshold is the threshold for solvability of the community detection in this case. However when the smallest community is smaller than $p^*$ , the spinodal curve only provides a lower bound on the threshold for solvability. In the regime below the Kesten-Stigum bound and above the spinodal curve, we also characterize the performance of best local algorithms as a function of the fraction of revealed vertices. Our proof relies on a careful analysis of the associated reconstruction problem on trees which might be of independent interest. In particular, we show that the spinodal curve corresponds to the reconstruction threshold on the tree.