Semi-supervised community detection on attributed networks using non-negative matrix tri-factorization with node popularity

The World Wide Web generates more and more data with links and node contents, which are always modeled as attributed networks. The identification of network communities plays an important role for people to understand and utilize the semantic functions of the data. A few methods based on non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) have been proposed to detect community structure with semantic information in attributed networks. However, previous methods have not modeled some key factors (which affect the link generating process together), including prior information, the heterogeneity of node degree, as well as the interactions among communities. The three factors have been demonstrated to primarily affect the results. In this paper, we propose a semi-supervised community detection method on attributed networks by simultaneously considering these three factors. First, a semi-supervised non-negative matrix tri-factorization model with node popularity (i.e., PSSNMTF) is designed to detect communities on the topology of the network. And then node contents are integrated into the PSSNMTF model to find the semantic communities more accurately, namely PSSNMTFC. Parameters of the PSSNMTFC model is estimated by using the gradient descent method. Experiments on some real and artificial networks illustrate that our new method is superior over some related state-of-the-art methods in terms of accuracy.