Information Theoretic Comparison of Stochastic Graph Models: Some Experiments

The Modularity-Q measure of community structure is known to falsely ascribe community structure to random graphs, at least when it is naively applied. Although Q is motivated by a simple kind of comparison of stochastic graph models, it has been suggested that a more careful comparison in an information-theoretic framework might avoid problems like this one. Most earlier papers exploring this idea have ignored the issue of skewed degree distributions and have only done experiments on a few small graphs. By means of a large-scale experiment on over 100 large complex networks, we have found that modeling the degree distribution is essential. Once this is done, the resulting information-theoretic clustering measure does indeed avoid Q’s bad property of seeing cluster structure in random graphs.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: WAW
• Authors: Kevin J. Lang
• Keywords: Algorithms, Community Structure, Degree Distribution, Random Graphs, WAW 2009