Seminar Details
2016-03-08 (14:00) : The ground truth about metadata and community detection in networks
At Euler building (A002)
Organized by Mathematical Engineering
Speaker :
Peel, Leto
Abstract :
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 partitions because such networks' links are formed explicitly based
on the planted partition. However, there are no planted communities in real world networks,
so in their place, it is common to use discrete-valued node attributes, or metadata,
to define a partition to act as ground truth. In this work, we first argue that metadata are
not the same as ground truth, and that to treat them as such raises theoretical and practical
concerns. Nevertheless, understanding the relationship between metadata and community structure
is important, so we subsequently introduce two new techniques to rigorously explore this relationship.