Deep Autoencoder-like Nonnegative Matrix Factorization for Community Detection

Community structure is ubiquitous in real-world complex networks. The task of community detection over these networks is of paramount importance in a variety of applications. Recently, nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) has been widely adopted for community detection due to its great interpretability and its natural fitness for capturing the community membership of nodes. However, the existing NMF-based community detection approaches are shallow methods. They learn the community assignment by mapping the original network to the community membership space directly. Considering the complicated and diversified topology structures of real-world networks, it is highly possible that the mapping between the original network and the community membership space contains rather complex hierarchical information, which cannot be interpreted by classic shallow NMF-based approaches. Inspired by the unique feature representation learning capability of deep autoencoder, we propose a novel model, named Deep Autoencoder-like NMF (DANMF), for community detection. Similar to deep autoencoder, DANMF consists of an encoder component and a decoder component. This architecture empowers DANMF to learn the hierarchical mappings between the original network and the final community assignment with implicit low-to-high level hidden attributes of the original network learnt in the intermediate layers. Thus, DANMF should be better suited to the community detection task. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that DANMF can achieve better performance than the state-of-the-art NMF-based community detection approaches.