ROBustness In Network (robin): an R package for Comparison and Validation of communities
Valeria Policastro, Dario Righelli, Annamaria Carissimo, Luisa Cutillo, Italia De Feis
1 ROBustness In Network (robin): an R package for Comparison and Validation of communities by Valeria Policastro, Dario Righelli, Annamaria Carissimo, Luisa Cutillo and Italia De Feis
Abstract
In network analysis, many community detection algorithms have been developed, however, their implementation leaves unaddressed the question of the statistical validation of the results. Here we present robin (ROBustness In Network), an R package to assess the robustness of the community structure of a network found by one or more methods to give indications about their reliability. The procedure initially detects if the community structure found by a set of algorithms is statistically significant and then compares two selected detection algorithms on the same graph to choose the one that better fits the network of interest. We demonstrate the use of our package on the American College Football benchmark dataset.
Introduction
Over the last twenty years, network science has become a strategic field of research thanks to the strong development of high-performance computing technologies. The activity and interaction of thousands of elements can now be measured simultaneously allowing us to model cellular networks, social networks, communication networks, power grids, trade networks, just to cite a few examples. Different types of data will produce different types of networks in terms of structure, connectivity and complexity. In the study of complex networks, a network is said to have community structure, if the nodes are densely connected within groups but sparsely connected between them (Girvan and Newman, 2002). The inference of the community structure of a network is an important task. Communities allow us to create a large-scale map of a network since individual communities act like meta-nodes in the network, which makes its study easier. Moreover, community detection can predict missing links and identify false links in the network. Despite its difficulty, a huge number of methods for community detection have been developed to deal with different size complexity and made available to the scientific community by open-source software packages. In this paper we will address a specific question: are the detected communities significant or are they a result of chance only due to the positions of edges in the network? An important answer to this question is the Order Statistics Local Optimisation Method (
OSLOM , ) presented in Lancichinetti et al. (2011). OSLOM introduces an iterative technique based on the local optimisation of a fitness function, the C-score (Lancichinetti et al., 2010), expressing the statistical significance of a cluster with respect to random fluctuations. The significance is evaluated fixing a threshold parameter P a priori. Another interesting approach is the Extraction of Statistically Significant Communities (
ESSC , https://github.com/jdwilson4/ESSC ) technique proposed in Wilson et al. (2014). The algorithm is iterative and identifies statistically stable communities measuring the significance of connections between a single vertex and a set of vertices in undirected networks under the configuration model (Bender and Canfield, 1978) used as the null hypothesis. The method employs multiple testing and false discovery rate control to update the candidate community. Kojaku and Masuda (2018) introduced the QStest ( https://github.com/skojaku/qstest/ ) a method to statistically test the significance of individual communities in a given network. Their algorithm works with different detection algorithms using a quality function that is consistent with the one used in community detection and takes into account the dependence of the quality function value on the community size. QStest assesses the statistical significance under the configuration model too. Very recently, He et al. (2020) suggested the Detecting statistically Significant Communities (DSC) method, a significance-based community detection algorithm, that uses a tight upper bound on the p-value under the configuration model coupled with an iterative local search method. OSLOM, ESSC and DSC assess the statistical significance of every single community analytically while QStest adopts the sampling method to calculate the p-value of a given community. Moreover, all of them detect statistically significant communities under the configuration model, and only QStest is independent of the detection algorithm. We present robin (ROBustness In Network) an R/CRAN package whose purpose is to give clear indications about the reliability of one or more community detection algorithms under study analyzing its robustness with respect to random perturbations. The idea behind robin is that if a partition is significant, it will be recovered even if the structure of the graph is modified while if the partition is not significant minimal modifications of the graph will be sufficient to change it. robin gets inspired by the concept presented by Carissimo et al. (2018), who studied the stability of the recovered partition against random perturbations of the original graph structure using tools from Functional Data Analysis (FDA). robin provides the best choice among the variety of the existing methods for the network of interest. It is based on a procedure that gives the opportunity to use the community detection techniques implemented in igraph package Csardi and Nepusz (2019), while providing the user with the possibility to include other community detection algorithms. robin initially detects if the community structure found by some algorithms is statistically significant, then it compares the different selected detection algorithms on the same network. robin assumes undirected graphs without loops and multiple edges. robin looks at global stability of the detected partition and not of single communities, but accepts any detection algorithm and any random model, and these aspects differentiate it from OSLOM, ESSC, DSC and the QStest. Moreover, unlike other studies that treat the comparison between algorithms in a theoretical way such as Yang et al. (2016), robin aims to give a practical answer to such comparison that can vary with the network of interest. The Model robin implements a methodology that examines the stability of the recovered partition by one or more algorithms. The methodology is useful for two purposes: to detect if the community structure found is statistically significant or is a result of chance and to choose the detection algorithm that better fits the network under study. These are implemented following two different workflows. The first workflow tests the stability of the partitions found by a single community detection algorithm against random perturbations of the original graph structure. To address this issue we specify a perturbation strategy (see subsection
Perturbation strategy ) and a null model to build some procedures based on a prefixed stability measure (see subsection
Stability measure ). Given : • a network of interest g • its corresponding null random model g • a Detection Algorithm (DA) • a stability measure (M) our process builds two curves as functions of the perturbation level p as shown in Figure 1 and tests their similarity by two types of functional statistical tests (see subsection Statistical Tests ). Figure 1:
Example of Mc random and Mc curves generated by an M stability measure The first curve Mc is obtained computing M between the partition of the original network g g
1. The second curve Mc random is obtained by computing M between the partition of a null random network g g
2. The comparison between the two M curves enables us to reconsider the problem regarding the significance of the retrieved community structure in the context of stability/robustness of the recovered partition against perturbations. The basic idea is that if small changes in the network cause a completely different grouping of the data, the detected communities are not reliable. For a better understanding of this point, we suggest the reader refer to the original paper Carissimo et al. (2018) where the methodology was developed. The choice of the null model plays a key role because we would expect it to reproduce the same structure of the real network but with completely random edges. For this reason, robin offers two possibilities: a degree preserving randomization by using the rewire function of the igraph package or a model chosen by the user. The degree preserving randomization, i.e. Configuration Model (CM), is a model able to capture and preserve strongly heterogeneous degree distributions often encountered in real network data sets and is the standard null model for empirical patterns. Nevertheless, it can happen that it is not sufficient to preserve only the degree of the graph understudy, so robin allows the user to include their own null model. In section
Example test: the American College football network we explore the dk null random model provided in Orsini et al. (2015), whose code is available at https://github.com/polcolomer/ RandNetGen as a possible alternative to CM. The dk -series model generates a random graph preserving the global organization of the original network at various increasing levels of details chosen by the user via the setting of the parameter d . More precisely, the dk -series is a converging series of properties that characterize the local network structure at an increasing level of detail and define a corresponding series of null models or random graph ensembles. Increasing values of d capture progressively more properties of the network: dk dk dk dk Figure 2:
Flowchart summarizing the procedure for testing the goodness of a community detection algorithm.
The first workflow is summarised as follows: 1. finds a partition C for the real network and a partition C for the null network, 2. perturbs both networks, 3. retrieves two new partitions C ( p ) and C ( p ) , 4. calculates two clustering distances (for the real network and the null network) between the ∈ ∈ original partitions and the ones obtained from the perturbed network as: M . C ( p ) , C Σ and M . C ( p ) , C Σ (1) Steps 2) - 4) are computed at different perturbation levels p [
0 : 0.05 : 0.6 ] to create two curves, one for the real network and one for the null model, then their similarity is tested by two functional statistical tests described in subsection Statistical Tests . Figure 2 shows the flowchart of the algorithm.
Figure 3:
Flowchart summarizing the procedure to compare two different community detection algorithms.
This procedure allows the filtering of the detection algorithms according to their performance. Moreover, the selected ones can be compared using the second workflow. The second workflow helps to choose among different community detection algorithms the one that better fits the network of interest, comparing their robustness two at a time. More precisely, the technique: 1. finds two partitions C and C inferred by two different algorithms on the network under study, 2. perturbs the network creating a new one, 3. retrieves two new partitions C ( p ) and C ( p ) , 4. evaluates M . C ( p ) , C Σ and M . C ( p ) , C Σ . Steps 2) - 4) are repeated at different perturbation levels p [ ] to create two curves and then their similarity is tested. Figure 3 shows the flowchart of the algorithm. Perturbation strategy
The perturbed network has been restricted to have the same number of vertices and edges as the original unperturbed network, therefore only the edges position changes. It is expected that, if a community structure is robust, it should be stable under small perturbations of the edges. This is because perturbing the network edges by a small amount will imply just a low percentage of nodes to be moved in different communities; on the other hand, perturbing a high percentage of the edges in the network will produce random clusters. Note that a null percentage of perturbation p =
0 will correspond to the original graph while a maximal perturbation level p = robin the perturbation of a network preserves the degree distribution of the original network. Two different procedures for the perturbation strategy are implemented, namely independent and dependent type. The independent strategy introduces a percentage p of perturbation in the original graph at each iteration, for p =
0, . . . , p max . Whereas the dependent procedure introduces 5% of perturbation at each iteration on the previous perturbed graph, starting from the original network, until p max of the graph’s edges will be perturbed. In the implementation of the perturbation strategy, we set up p max = < p < p max = p and gives as output the mean of the stability measure for every 10 graphs generated. Stability measure
The procedure we implemented is based on four different stability measures: • the Variation of Information (VI) proposed by Meila ˇ (2007), • the Normalized Mutual Information (NMI) measure proposed by Danon et al. (2005), • the split-join distance of van Dongen (2000), • the Adjusted Rand Index (ARI) by Hubert and Arabie (1985). VI measures the amount of information lost and gained in changing from one cluster to another, while split-join distance calculates the number of nodes that have to be exchanged to transform any of the two clusterings into the other; but for both of them low values represent more similar clusters and high values represent more different clusters. On the contrary, NMI and ARI are similarity measures therefore lower values identify more different clusters and higher values more similar ones. To make all the measures comparable, we considered the 1-1 transformation for the NMI and the ARI since they vary between [
0, 1 ] as: f ( X ) = − X Only two of the four proposed stability measures, i.e. split-join and VI, are distances. Moreover, they differ in their dependency on the number of clusters K: while the VI distance grows logarithmically with K, the split-join metric grows with K toward the upper bound of 1. To make the four different stability measures comparable, we normalized VI and split-join between 0 and 1 (i.e. we divided the VI and the split-join by their maximum, respectively log ( n ) and 2 n , where n indicates the number of vertices in the graph). Statistical Tests robin allows different multiple statistical tests to check the differences between the real and the random curve or between the curves built from two different detection algorithms. The variation of p from 0 to 0.6 induces an intrinsic order to the data structure as in temporal data. This lets p assume the same role as a time point in a temporal process and as a consequence, we can use any suitable time series approach to compare our curves. In the following, we describe the use of two such approaches. The first is a test based on the Gaussian Process regression (GP) described in Kalaitzis and Lawrence (2011b). In this paper the authors use GP to compare treatment and control profiles in biological time-course experiments. The main idea is to test if two time series represent the same or two different temporal processes. A gaussian process is a collection of random variables, any finite number of which have a joint Gaussian distribution and is completely specified by its mean function and its covariance function, see e.g. Rasmussen and Williams (2006). Given the mean function m ( x ) and the covariance function k ( x , x J ) of a real process f ( x ) then we can write the GP as f ( x ) ∼ GP( m ( x ) , k ( x , x J ) . (2) The random variables f = ( f ( X ) , . . . , f ( X n )) T represent the value of the function f ( x ) at time locations ( X i ) i = n , being f ( x ) the true trajectory/profile of the gene. Assuming f ( x ) = Φ ( x ) T w , w w w n n p ( y | x ) =
1 exp . − y t K y − y Σ , (5) M ( x ) M ( x ) where Φ ( x ) are projection basis functions, with prior w ∼ N ( , σ I ) , we have m ( x ) = Φ ( x ) T E [ w ] = k ( x , x J ) = σ Φ ( x ) T Φ ( x ) (3) f ( x ) ∼ GP( σ Φ ( x ) T Φ ( x )) . (4) Since observations are noisy, i.e. y = Φ w + ε , with Φ = ( Φ ( X ) T , . . . , Φ ( X n ) T ) , assuming that the noise ε ∼ N ( , σ I ) and using Eq. (3), the marginal likelihood becomes with K y = σ ΦΦ T + σ I . ( π ) . K y . w n In this framework, the hypothesis testing problem over the perturbation interval [ p max ] can be reformulated as: M ( x ) M ( x ) H : log ∼ GP . k . x , x J ΣΣ against H : log ∼ GP . m ( x ) , k . x , x J ΣΣ , (6) where x represents the perturbation level. To compare the two curves, robin used the Bayes Factor (BF), that is approximated with a log-ratio of marginal likelihoods of two GPs, each one representing the hypothesis of differential (the profile has a significant underlying signal) and non-differential expression (there is no underlying signal in the profile, just random noise). The second test implemented is based on the Interval Testing Procedure (ITP) described in Pini and Vantini (2016). The ITP provides an interval-wise non-parametric functional testing and is not only able to assess the equality in distribution between functions, but also to underline specific differences. Indeed, users can see where are localized the differences between the two curves. The Interval Testing Procedure is based on: 1. Basis Expansion: functional data are projected on a functional basis (i.e. Fourier or B-splines expansion); 2.
Interval-Wise Testing: statistical tests are performed on each interval of basis coefficients; 3.
Multiple Correction: for each component of the basis expansion, an adjusted p-value is com- puted from the p-values of the tests performed in the previous step. In summary, GP provides a global answer on the dissimilarity of the two M curves while ITP points out local changes between such curves. As a rule of the thumb, we suggest initially using GP to flag a difference and then ITP to understand at which level of perturbation such a difference is locally significant. We also provide a global method to quantify the differences between the curves when they are very close. This is based on the calculation of the area under the curves with a spline approach.
Package structure
Installation
Once in the R environment, it is possible to install and load robin package by using the standard installation function which retrieves the package from the CRAN repository and takes care of its dependencies, as follow: install.packages("robin")
The robin package includes as dependencies igraph (Csardi and Nepusz, 2019), networkD3 (C. Gandrud and Yetman, 2017), ggplot2 (Wickham, 2019), gridExtra (Auguie, 2017), fdatest (Pini and Vantini, 2015) , gprege (Kalaitzis and Lawrence, 2011a) and
DescTools (Signorell and mult. al., 2019) packages. All, except gprege which is a Bioconductor package, are automatically loaded with the command: library(robin).
To install gprege package, start R and enter: if (!requireNamespace("BiocManager", quietly = TRUE)) install.packages("BiocManager") BiocManager::install("gprege") Data import and visualization robin is a user-friendly software providing some additional functions for data import and visualization, such as prepGraph , plotGraph and plotComm . The function prepGraph , required by the procedure, reads and simplifies undirected graphs removing loops and multiple edges. The available input graphs formats are: “edgelist”, “pajek”, “ncol”, “lgl”, “graphml”, “dimacs”, “graphdb”, “gml”, “dl” and an igraph object. The function plotGraph , with the aid of the network3D package, starting from an igraph object loaded with prepGraph , shows an interactive 3D graphical representation of the network, useful to visualize the network of interest before the analysis. Furthermore, the function plotComm helps to plot a graph with colourful nodes that simplifies the visualization of the detected communities, given the membership of the communities. Procedures robin , embeds all the community detection algorithms present in igraph : • cluster_edge_betweenness : it uses the concept of edge betweenness score that measures the number of shortest paths passing through the edge. It is based on an iterative procedure that calculates the betweenness of edges and removes those edges with the highest betweenness, get- ting a hierarchical map of the network (Newman and Girvan, 2004). The connected components are communities. • cluster_fast_greedy : it is based on a greedy optimisation of the modularity and uses a hier- archical agglomerative approach for detecting community detection structure (Clauset et al., 2005). • cluster_infomap : it is based on information-theoretic principles. It finds the community detection structure that minimizes the description length for a random walk on the graph given by the map equation over possible network partitions (Rosvall and Bergstrom, 2008). • cluster_leading_eigen : it is based on a maximization process written in terms of the eigenval- ues and eigenvectors of the modularity matrix, instead of the graph Laplacian commonly used in graph partitioning calculations (Newman, 2006). • cluster_louvain : it implements the multi-level modularity optimization algorithm. The algo- rithm starts creating small communities looking at local modularity and then in an iterative procedure builds networks whose nodes are the communities. The process stops when max- imum modularity is obtained and a hierarchy of communities is produced (Blondel et al., 2008). • cluster_label_prop : it works by propagating labels through the network. Nodes are initialized with unique labels and updated to the labels of the maximum numbers of their neighbours iteratively. The algorithm reaches convergence when none of the nodes needs to update its label anymore (U. N. Raghavan, 2007). • cluster_spinglass : it is based on the Potts model. In this model, each node can be in a spin state and the edges specify the pairs of nodes that stay in the same spin state. The model is simulated several times and communities are composed of nodes in the same state (Reichardt and Bornholdt, 2006) . • cluster_walktrap : it defines a measure of similarity between nodes in terms of random walks and uses an agglomerative method to group iteratively nodes into communities. The basic idea is that short random walks on a graph tend to stay in the same community (Pons and Latapy, 2005). robin gives the possibility to input a custom external function to detect the communities. The user can provide his own function as value of the parameter FUN in both analyses, implemented into the functions robinRobust and robinCompare . These two functions create the internal process for perturbation and measurement of communities stability. In particular robinRobust tests the robustness of a chosen detection algorithm and robinCompare is specifically designed to compare two different detection algorithms. The option measure in the robinRobust and robinCompare functions provides the flexibility to choose between the four different measures listed in subsection
Stability measure . robin offers two choices for the null model to set up for robinRobust : • external building according to users’ preferences, then the null graph is passed as a variable, • generation by using the function random . The function random creates a random graph with the same degree distribution of the original graph, but with completely random edges, by using the rewire function of the igraph package with the keeping_degseq option that preserves the degree distribution of the original network. The function rewire randomly assigns a number of edges between vertices with the given degree distribution. Note that robin assumes undirected graphs without loops and multiple edges which are directly created, from any input graph, by the function prepGraph Construction of curves
The plotRobin function allows the user to generate two curves based on the computation of the chosen stability measures. When plotRobin is used considering as input parameters the output of robinRobust , i.e. the first step of the overall procedure, the first curve represents the measure between the partition of the original unperturbed graph and the partition of each perturbed graph (blue curve in Figure 4-Left panel), and the second curve is obtained in the same way but considering as the original graph the random graph (red curve in Figure 4-Left panel). The comparison between the two curves turns the question about the significance of the retrieved community structure into the study of the robustness of the recovered partition against perturbation. When plotRobin is used considering as input parameters the output of robinCompare , i.e. the second step of the overall procedure, it generates a plot that depicts two curves, one for each clustering algorithm. In the right panel of Figure 4 each curve is obtained computing the measure between the partition of the original unperturbed graph with the partition of each perturbed graph, where the partition method is either Louvain (blue curve) or Fast Greedy (red curve).
Figure 4:
Curves of the null model and the real data generated by the VI stability measure and the Louvain detection algorithm on the American College Football network (Left panel). Curves of the Louvain and Fast greedy algorithm generated by the VI stability measure on the American College Football network (Right panel) (Girvan and Newman, 2002).
Testing
The GP test is implemented in robinGPTest and uses the R package gprege (Kalaitzis and Lawrence, 2011a). The ITP test is implemented in robinFDATest and uses the R package fdatest (Pini and Vantini, 2015). The area under the curves is calculated by the function robinAUC and relies on the
DescTools package. Figure 5 shows the curves for the comparison of Louvain and Fast greedy algorithms’ performance generated by the VI stab ility measure using the Interval Testing Procedure on the American College Football network (left panel) (Girvan and Newman, 2002) and corresponding adjusted p-values (right panel). All the functions implemented in robin are summarized in Table 2.
Computational time
The time complexity of the proposed strategy, more precisely of the robinRobust function, is evaluated as follows. Generating a rewired network with N nodes and M edges consumes O ( N + M ) time, for both the real and the null model. For each network we detect the communities, using any community detection algorithm present in igraph or any custom external algorithm inserted by the user, and calculate a stability measure. Let D be the time complexity associated with the community detection algorithm chosen. The overall procedure is iterated k =
100 times for each percentage p of the Figure 5:
Curves of the Louvain and Fast greedy algorithm generated by the VI stability measure using the Interval Testing Procedure on the American College Football network (Left panel). Corresponding p-values and adjusted p-values for all the intervals with the horizontal red line on to the critical value 0.05 (Right panel) . n p =
12 perturbation levels ( p ∈ [ p max ] , p max = O ( D + ((( N + M + D ) ∗ k ) ∗ n p )) time both for the real and the null model. In Table 1 we show the computational time evaluated on a computer with an Intel 4 GHz i7-4790K processor and 24GB of memory. In this example, we used Louvain as a detection algorithm on the
LFR benchmark graphs (Lancichinetti et al., 2008). The time complexity could be mitigated using parallel computing but this not yet implemented.
Table 1:
Computational time N ODES E DGES T IME ( SECS )
500 2.1
Example test: the American College football network robin includes the
American College football benchmark dataset as an analysis example that is freely available at . The dataset contains the network of United State football games between Division I colleges during the 2000 season (Girvan and Newman, 2002). It is a network of 115 vertices that represent teams (identified by their college names) and 613 edges that represent regular-season games between the two teams they connect. The graph has the ground truth, where each node has a value that indicates to which of the 12 conferences it belongs, and this offers a good opportunity to test the ability of robin to validate the community robustness. It is known that each conference contains around 8-12 teams, the games are more frequent between members of the same conference than between members of different conferences, they are on average seven between teams of the same conference and four between different ones. We applied all the methods listed in subsection
Procedures to this network, choosing as measure the VI metric. library(robin) my_network <- system.file("example/football.gml", package="robin") graph <- prepGraph(file=my_network, file.format="gml") attributes<-vertex_attr(graph, index = V(graph)) real<-attributes$value real<-as_membership(real) Table 2:
Summary of the functions implemented in robin . F UNCTION D ESCRIPTION
Import/Manipulation prepGraph random
Management and preprocessing of input graph
Building of null model
Analysis robinRobust robinCompare
Comparison of a community detection method versus random perturbations of the original graph
Comparison of two different community detection methods
Visualization methodCommunity membershipCommunities plotGraph plotComm plotRobin
Detection of the community structure
Detection of the membership vector of the community structure
Graphical interactive representation of the network
Graphical interactive representation of the network and its communities
Plots of the two curves
Test robinGPTest robinFDATest robinAUC
GP test and evaluation of the Bayes factor ITP test and evaluation of the adjusted p-values Evaluation of the area under the curve set.seed(10) members_In<-membershipCommunities(graph=graph, method=DA) VI_In <- compare(real, members_In, method="vi")
Note that the variable DA refers to the detection algorithms present in igraph and can assume the following values: fastGreedy , infomap , walktrap , edgeBetweenness , spinglass , leadingEigen , labelProp , louvain . The function compare is contained in the package igraph and permits the assessment of the distance between two community structures according to the chosen method. Table 3 summarizes the VI results calculated between the real communities and the ones that the detection algorithms created. It is possible to observe that the best performance is offered by Infomap, having the lowest VI value, followed by Spinglass. Louvain, Propagating Labels, Walktrap and Edge betweenness have a similar intermediate VI value, while the worst performance is given by Fast greedy and Leading eigenvector. Then, we used robin to check if the results are confirmed looking at the VI curves and the results of the testing procedure for the second workflow, i.e. the one comparing two detection algorithms, considering Infomap versus all the others. Table 3:
VI measure between different methods and ground-truth. M ETHODS N ORMALIZED VI cluster_infomap cluster_spinglass cluster_louvain cluster_label_prop cluster_walktrap cluster_edge_betweenness cluster_fast_greedy cluster_leading_eigen comp <- robinCompare(graph=graph, method1=DA1, method2=DA2, measure="vi", type="independent") plotRobin(graph=graph, model1=comp$Mean1, model2=comp$Mean2, measure="vi") Figure 6 shows the results we obtained. If we focus on the perturbation interval [
0, 0.3 ] , it is possible to note the similar behaviour between the curves representing Infomap/Spinglass, Infomap/Louvain, Infomap/Propagating Labels, Infomap/Walktrap and Infomap/Edge betweenness, with a closer distance between Infomap/Spinglass. On the contrary, the curves Infomap/Fast greedy and Infomap/Leading eigenvector have an opposite behaviour, building almost an ellipse. This confirms what displayed in Table 3. In our overall procedure, we explored two different ways of generating a null model, namely the Configuration Model (CM) and the dk -series model. graphRandomCM<- random(graph=graph) graphRandomDK<- prepGraph(file="dk2.1_footballEdgelist.txt", file.format = "edgelist") plotGraph(graph) plotGraph(graphRandomCM) plotGraph(graphRandomDK) The different structures provided by the real data network, CM and dk -series with d = robinRobust to assess the robustness of each detection algorithm. proc_CM <- robinRobust(graph=graph, graphRandom=graphRandomCM, measure="vi", method=DA, type="independent") plotRobin(graph=graph, model1=proc_CM$Mean,model2=proc_CM$MeanRandom, measure="vi") The dk -series model generates a random graph preserving the global organization of the original network at various increasing levels of details chosen by the user via the setting of the parameter d . In particular, we chose the dk random graph with d=2.1. proc_DK <- robinRobust(graph=graph, graphRandom=graphRandomDK, measure="vi", method="fastGreedy", type="independent") Figure 6:
Plot of the VI curves of Infomap against all other methods. plotRobin(graph=graph, model1=proc_DK$Mean, model2=proc_DK$MeanRandom, measure="vi")
Figure 9 shows the stability measure curves of each detection algorithm compared to dk 2.1 null model. For all the methods, the two curves are very close due to the capability of the null model to preserve a structure similar to the real network and visually confirm the results in Table 3. Moreover, for the dk -series model we tested the differences between the two curves using the GP methodology implemented in the function in robinGPTest . Figure 7:
Graph of the real data (Upper panel); graph of the CM null model (Left - lower panel); graph of the dk -series null model with d = BFdk <- robinGPTest(model1=proc_DK$Mean, model2=proc_DK$MeanRandom)
Results are shown in Table 4 and are in agreement with those shown in Table 3.
Table 4:
Bayes Factor and AUC ratio for dk -series with d = M ETHODS B AYES F ACTOR
AUC cluster_infomap cluster_spinglass cluster_louvain cluster_label_prop cluster_walktrap cluster_edge_betweenness cluster_fast_greedy cluster_leading_eigen
Fastgreedy clearly fails in recovery the communities, LeadingEigen has stronger evidence but too weak when compared to the other methods. Louvain, Walktrap and EdgeBetweenness have the same strong evidence followed by Spinglass and Infomap. LabelProp shows the strongest evidence but the result is obviously influenced by the swap between the two curves when the perturbation is greater than 20%, underlying a worse performance of the algorithm. The same swap can be noted for Infomap at 35% perturbation level, but with a less difference between the two curves. This is confirmed by the fact that the ratios between the AUC of the real null model curve and the AUC of the real network are close to 1.
AUC <- robinAUC(graph=graph, model1=proc_DK$Mean, model2=proc_DK$MeanRandom, measure="vi") AUCdkratio <- AUC$area2/AUC$area1
Also note that LabelProp originate the paradox that AUC of the real model curve exceeds the AUC of the null network, despite the hypothesis testing result is positive. Hence it is always the case to look at the plots and AUC ratios. Figure 8:
Plot of the VI curves of the CM null model and all the algorithms implemented.
Conclusion
In this paper, we presented robin , an R/CRAN package to assess the robustness of the community structure of a network found by one or more detection methods, providing an indication about their reliability. The procedure implemented is useful to compare different community detection algorithms and choose the one that best fits the network of interest. More precisely, robin initially detects if the community structure found by some algorithms is statistically significant, then it compares the different selected detection algorithms on the same network. robin uses analysis tools set up for functional data analysis, such as GP regression and ITP . The core functions of the package are robinRobust and robinCompare , that build the stability measure curves for the null model and the network understudy for a fixed detection algorithm and the stability measure for the network understudy for two detection algorithms, respectively; and robinGPTest and robinFDATest , that implement the GP test and the ITP Figure 9:
Plot of the VI curves of the dk -series null model with d = test. We illustrated the usage of the package on a benchmark dataset. The package is available on CRAN at https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=robin . Computational details
The results in this paper were obtained using R 3.6.1 with the packages igraph version 1.2.4.2, net- workD3 version 0.4, ggplot2 version 3.2.1, gridExtra version 2.3, fdatest version 2.1, gprege version 1.30.0 and
DescTools version 0.99.31. R itself and all packages used are available from the Compre- hensive R Archive Network (CRAN) at https://CRAN.R-project.org/ . Acknowledgments
This work was supported by the project Piattaforma Tecnologica ADVISE - Regione Campania.
Contributions
V.P. implemented the software and analysed its properties. D.R. supported V.P. in R package implemen- tation. A.C., L.C. and I.D.F. conceived the work, contributed to the development and implementation of the concept, discussed and analysed the results. A.C., L.C., I.D.F. and V.P. wrote the manuscript.
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Valeria Policastro (package author and creator) Dipartimento Scienze e Tecnologie Ambientali, Biologiche e Farmaceutiche
Universitá degli Studi della Campania “Luigi Vanvitelli”
Via Vivaldi, 43 81100 Caserta, Italia and
Istituto per le Applicazioni del Calcolo “M. Picone” - sede di Napoli Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche via Pietro Castellino 111 80131 Napoli, Italy [email protected]
Dario Righelli Dipartimento di Statistica Universitá di Padova Via Cesare Battisti, 241 35121 Padova, Italia and Istituto per le Applicazioni del Calcolo “M. Picone” - sede di Napoli Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche via Pietro Castellino 111 80131 Napoli, Italy [email protected]
Annamaria Carissimo (corresponding author)
Istituto per le Applicazioni del Calcolo “M. Picone” - sede di Napoli Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche via Pietro Castellino 111 80131 Napoli, Italy [email protected]
Luisa Cutillo (corresponding author) School of Mathematics University of Leeds Leeds LS2 9JT, United Kingdom and Dipartimento di Studi Aziendali e Quantitativi
Universitá degli Studi di Napoli “Parthenope’
Via Generale Parisi, 13 80132, Napoli, Italia [email protected]
Italia De Feis (corresponding author)
Istituto per le Applicazioni del Calcolo “M. Picone” - sede di Napoli Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche via Pietro Castellino 111 80131 Napoli, Italy- sede di Napoli Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche via Pietro Castellino 111 80131 Napoli, Italy