Community Detection in Partial Correlation Network Models

Author(s):  
Christian T. Brownlees ◽  
Gabor Lugosi
Author(s):  
Christian Brownlees ◽  
Guðmundur Stefán Guðmundsson ◽  
Gábor Lugosi

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander P. Christensen ◽  
Hudson Golino

Estimating the number of factors in multivariate data is at the crux of psychological measurement. Factor analysis has a long tradition in the field but it’s been challenged recently by exploratory graph analysis (EGA), an approach based on network psychometrics. EGA first estimates a regularized partial correlation network using the graphical least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (GLASSO), and then applies the Walktrap community detection algorithm, which identifies communities (or factors) in the network. Simulation studies have demonstrated that EGA has comparable or better accuracy than contemporary state-of-the-art factor analytic methods (e.g., parallel analysis), while providing some additional advantages such as not requiring rotations and deterministic allocation of items into factors. Despite EGA’s effectiveness, there has yet to be an investigation into whether other community detection algorithms could achieve equivalent or better perfomance. In the present study, we performed a Monte Carlo simulation using the GLASSO and two variants of a non-regularized partial correlation network estimation method and several community detection algorithms in the open-source igraph package in R. The purpose of the present study was to critically examine whether the network estimation and community detection components of EGA are optimal for estimating factors in psychological data as well as to provide a systematic investigation into how different community detection algorithms perform “out-of-the-box.” The results indicate that the Fast-greedy, Louvain, and Walktrap algorithms paired with the GLASSO method were consistently among the most accurate and least biased across conditions.


2018 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 2905-2929 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matteo Barigozzi ◽  
Christian Brownlees ◽  
Gábor Lugosi

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Vesa Kuikka

AbstractWe present methods for analysing hierarchical and overlapping community structure and spreading phenomena on complex networks. Different models can be developed for describing static connectivity or dynamical processes on a network topology. In this study, classical network connectivity and influence spreading models are used as examples for network models. Analysis of results is based on a probability matrix describing interactions between all pairs of nodes in the network. One popular research area has been detecting communities and their structure in complex networks. The community detection method of this study is based on optimising a quality function calculated from the probability matrix. The same method is proposed for detecting underlying groups of nodes that are building blocks of different sub-communities in the network structure. We present different quantitative measures for comparing and ranking solutions of the community detection algorithm. These measures describe properties of sub-communities: strength of a community, probability of formation and robustness of composition. The main contribution of this study is proposing a common methodology for analysing network structure and dynamics on complex networks. We illustrate the community detection methods with two small network topologies. In the case of network spreading models, time development of spreading in the network can be studied. Two different temporal spreading distributions demonstrate the methods with three real-world social networks of different sizes. The Poisson distribution describes a random response time and the e-mail forwarding distribution describes a process of receiving and forwarding messages.


2021 ◽  
Vol 54 (3) ◽  
pp. 1-35
Author(s):  
Matteo Magnani ◽  
Obaida Hanteer ◽  
Roberto Interdonato ◽  
Luca Rossi ◽  
Andrea Tagarelli

A multiplex network models different modes of interaction among same-type entities. In this article, we provide a taxonomy of community detection algorithms in multiplex networks. We characterize the different algorithms based on various properties and we discuss the type of communities detected by each method. We then provide an extensive experimental evaluation of the reviewed methods to answer three main questions: to what extent the evaluated methods are able to detect ground-truth communities, to what extent different methods produce similar community structures, and to what extent the evaluated methods are scalable. One goal of this survey is to help scholars and practitioners to choose the right methods for the data and the task at hand, while also emphasizing when such choice is problematic.


2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 204-223
Author(s):  
Toby Hopp

Although online political incivility has increasingly become an object of scholarly inquiry, there exists little agreement on the construct’s precise definition. The goal of this work was therefore to explore the relational dynamics among previously identified dimensions of online political incivility. The results of a regularized partial correlation network indicated that a communicator’s desire to exclude attitude-discrepant others from discussion played an especially influential role in the variable network. The data also suggested that certain facets of incivility may be likely to be deployed together. Specifically, the data suggested the existence of two identifiable groupings of incivility factors: (1) variables pertaining to violation of speech-based norms and (2) variables pertaining to the violation of the inclusion-based norms that underlie democratic communication processes. These results are discussed in the context of political discussion and deliberation.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simran Johal ◽  
Mijke Rhemtulla

Ordinal data are extremely common in psychological research, with variables often assessed using Likert-type scales that take on only a few values. At the same time, researchers are increasingly fitting network models to ordinal item-level data. Yet very little work has evaluated how network estimation techniques perform when data are ordinal. We use a Monte Carlo simulation to evaluate and compare the performance of three estimation methods applied to either Pearson or polychoric correlations: EBIC graphical lasso with regularized edge estimates (“EBIC”), BIC model selection with partial correlation edge estimates (“BIC”), and multiple regression with p-value-based edge selection and partial correlation edge estimates (“MR”). We vary the number and distribution of thresholds, distribution of the underlying continuous data, sample size, model size, and network density, and we evaluate results in terms of model structure (sensitivity and false positive rate) and edge weight bias. Our results show that the effect of treating the data as ordinal versus continuous depends primarily on the number of levels in the data, and that estimation performance was affected by the sample size, the shape of the underlying distribution, and the symmetry of underlying thresholds. Furthermore, which estimation method is recommended depends on the research goals: MR methods tended to maximize sensitivity of edge detection, BIC approaches minimized false positives, and either one of these produced accurate edge weight estimates in sufficiently large samples. We identify some particularly difficult combinations of conditions for which no method produces stable results.


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