Community Detection in Social Networks Using Deep Learning

Community structure is found everywhere from simple networks to real world complex networks. The problem of community detection is to predict clusters of nodes that are densely connected among themselves. The task of community detection has a wide variety of applications ranging from recommendation systems, advertising, marketing, epidemic spreading, cancer detection etc. The two mainly existing approaches for community detection, namely, stochastic block model and modularity maximization model focus on building a low dimensional network embedding to reconstruct the original network structure. However the mapping to low dimensional space in these methods is purely linear. Understanding the fact that real world networks contain non-linear structures in abundance, aforementioned methods become less practical for real world networks. Considering the nonlinear representation power of deep neural networks, several solutions based on autoencoders are being proposed in the recent literature. In this work, we propose a deep neural network architecture for community detection wherein we stack multiple autoencoders and apply parameter sharing. This method of training autoencoders has been successfully applied for the problems of link prediction and node classification in the literature. Our enhanced model with modified architecture produced better results compared to many other existing methods. We tested our model on a few benchmark datasets and obtained competitive results.