The ground truth about metadata and community detection in networks.

ABSTRACT: Across many scientific domains, there is a common need to automatically extract a simplified view or coarse-graining of how a complex system's components interact. This general task is called community detection in networks and is analogous to searching for clusters in independent vector data. It is common to evaluate the performance of community detection algorithms by their ability to find so-called ground truth communities. This works well in synthetic networks with planted communities because these networks' links are formed explicitly based on those known communities. However, there are no planted communities in real-world networks. Instead, it is standard practice to treat some observed discrete-valued node attributes, or metadata, as ground truth. We show that metadata are not the s

SUBMITTER: Peel L 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5415338 | biostudies-literature | 2017 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature