Community learning by graph approximation

Learning communities from a graph is an important problem in many domains. Different types of communities can be generalized as link-pattern based communities. In this paper, we propose a general model based on graph approximation to learn link-pattern based community structures from a graph. The model generalizes the traditional graph partitioning approaches and is applicable to learning various community structures. Under this model, we derive a family of algorithms which are flexible to learn various community structures and easy to incorporate the prior knowledge of the community structures. Experimental evaluation and theoretical analysis show the effectiveness and great potential of the proposed model and algorithms. © 2007 IEEE.