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Towards explainable community finding

Sophie Sadler, Derek Greene, Daniel Archambault Orcid Logo

Applied Network Science, Volume: 7, Issue: 1

Swansea University Authors: Sophie Sadler, Daniel Archambault Orcid Logo

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Abstract

The detection of communities of nodes is an important task in understanding the structure of networks. Multiple approaches have been developed to tackle this problem, many of which are in common usage in real-world applications, such as in public health networks. However, clear insight into the reas...

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Published in: Applied Network Science
ISSN: 2364-8228
Published: Springer Science and Business Media LLC 2022
Online Access: Check full text

URI: https://cronfa.swan.ac.uk/Record/cronfa62122
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Abstract: The detection of communities of nodes is an important task in understanding the structure of networks. Multiple approaches have been developed to tackle this problem, many of which are in common usage in real-world applications, such as in public health networks. However, clear insight into the reasoning behind the community labels produced by these algorithms is rarely provided. Drawing inspiration from the machine learning literature, we aim to provide post-hoc explanations for the outputs of these algorithms using interpretable features of the network. In this paper, we propose a model-agnostic methodology that identifies a set of informative features to help explain the output of a community finding algorithm. We apply it to three well-known algorithms, though the methodology is designed to generalise to new approaches. As well as identifying important features for a post-hoc explanation system, we report on the common features found made by the different algorithms and the differences between the approaches.
Keywords: Network Analysis; Graph Mining; Community Detection; Explainability
College: Faculty of Science and Engineering
Funders: This work is supported by the UKRI AIMLAC CDT, funded by Grant EP/S023992/1 and by the UKRI EPSRC Grant EP/V033670/1. The research was also partly supported by Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) under Grant No. SFI/12/RC/2289_P2.
Issue: 1