Modeling Community Evolution Characteristics of Dynamic Networks with Evolutionary Bayesian Nonnegative Matrix Factorization

Abstract

In most cases, the block structures and evolution characteristics always coexist in dynamic networks. This leads to inaccurate results of temporal community structure analysis with a two-step strategy. Fortunately, a few approaches take the evolution characteristics into account for modeling temporal community structures. But the number of communities cannot be determined automatically. Therefore, a model, Evolutionary Bayesian Nonnegative Matrix Factorization (EvoBNMF), is proposed in this paper. It focuses on modeling the temporal community structures with evolution characteristics. More specifically, the evolution behavior, which is introduced into EvoBNMF, can quantify the transfer intensity of communities between adjacent snapshots for modeling the evolution characteristics. Innovatively, the most appropriate number of communities can be determined autonomously by shrinking the corresponding evolution behaviors. Experimental results show that our approach has superior performance on temporal community detection with the virtue of autonomous determination of the number of communities.