English

Universality of the stochastic block model

Physics and Society 2018-10-03 v2 Machine Learning

Abstract

Mesoscopic pattern extraction (MPE) is the problem of finding a partition of the nodes of a complex network that maximizes some objective function. Many well-known network inference problems fall in this category, including, for instance, community detection, core-periphery identification, and imperfect graph coloring. In this paper, we show that the most popular algorithms designed to solve MPE problems can in fact be understood as special cases of the maximum likelihood formulation of the stochastic block model (SBM), or one of its direct generalizations. These equivalence relations show that the SBM is nearly universal with respect to MPE problems.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1806.04214,
  title  = {Universality of the stochastic block model},
  author = {Jean-Gabriel Young and Guillaume St-Onge and Patrick Desrosiers and Louis J. Dubé},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1806.04214},
  year   = {2018}
}

Comments

13 pages, 4 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-23T02:26:26.991Z