An Axiomatic Approach to Community Detection

Inspired by social choice theory in voting and other contexts [2], we provide the first axiomatic approach to community identification in social and information networks. We start abstract framework, called preference networks [3], which, for each member, gives their ranking of all the other members of the network. This preference model enables us to focus on the fundamental conceptual question: What constitutes a community in a social network? Within this framework, we axiomatically study the formation and structures of communities in two different ways. First, we apply social choice theory and define communities indirectly by postulating that they are fixed points of a preference aggregation function obeying certain desirable axioms. Second, we directly postulate six desirable axioms for communities to satisfy, without reference to preference aggregation. For the second approach, we prove a taxonomy theorem that provides a structural characterization of the family of axiom-conf...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2016
• Where: INNOVATIONS
• Authors: Christian Borgs, Jennifer T. Chayes, Adrian Marple, Shang-Hua Teng
• Keywords: INNOVATIONS 2016