# Scalable detection of statistically significant communities and hierarchies, using message-passing for modularity

Modularity is a popular measure of community structure. However, maximizing the modularity can lead to many competing partitions, with almost the same modularity, that are poorly correlated with each other. It can also produce illusory "communities" in random graphs where none exist. We address this problem by using the modularity as a Hamiltonian at finite temperature, and using an efficient Belief Propagation algorithm to obtain the consensus of many partitions with high modularity, rather than looking for a single partition that maximizes it. We show analytically and numerically that the proposed algorithm works all the way down to the detectability transition in networks generated by the stochastic block model. It also performs well on real-world networks, revealing large communities in some networks where previous work has claimed no communities exist. Finally we show that by applying our algorithm recursively, subdividing communities until no statistically-significant subcommunities can be found, we can detect hierarchical structure in real-world networks more efficiently than previous methods.

## Authors

• 27 publications
• 20 publications
• ### Detectability of hierarchical communities in networks

We study the problem of recovering a planted hierarchy of partitions in ...
09/16/2020 ∙ by Leto Peel, et al. ∙ 0

• ### Detecting Communities in Heterogeneous Multi-Relational Networks:A Message Passing based Approach

Community is a common characteristic of networks including social networ...
04/06/2020 ∙ by Maoying Qiao, et al. ∙ 0

• ### Hierarchical community structure in networks

Modular and hierarchical structures are pervasive in real-world complex ...
09/15/2020 ∙ by Michael T. Schaub, et al. ∙ 0

• ### Disentangling group and link persistence in Dynamic Stochastic Block models

We study the inference of a model of dynamic networks in which both comm...
01/20/2017 ∙ by Paolo Barucca, et al. ∙ 0

• ### Revealing consensus and dissensus between network partitions

Community detection methods attempt to divide a network into groups of n...
05/28/2020 ∙ by Tiago P. Peixoto, et al. ∙ 0

• ### An incremental local-first community detection method for dynamic graphs

Community detections for large-scale real world networks have been more ...
08/19/2018 ∙ by Hiroki Kanezashi, et al. ∙ 0

• ### Keep your Communities Clean: Exploring the Routing Message Impact of BGP Communities

BGP communities are widely used to tag prefix aggregates for policy, tra...
10/02/2020 ∙ by Thomas Krenc, et al. ∙ 0

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## I Results

### i.1 Results on the Stochastic Block Model

Also called the planted partition model, the stochastic block model (SBM) is a popular ensemble of networks with community structure. There are groups of nodes, and each node has a group label ; thus is the true, or planted, partition. Edges are generated independently according to a matrix , by connecting each pair of nodes with probability . Here for simplicity we discuss the commonly studied case where the groups have equal size and where has only two distinct entries, if and if . We use to denote the ratio between these two entries. In the assortative case, and . When is small, the community structure is strong; when , the network becomes an ER graph.

For a given average degree

, there is a so-called detectability phase transition

decelle-etal-prl ; decelle-etal-pre , at a critical value

 ϵ∗=√c−1√c−1+q. (2)

For , BP can label the nodes with high accuracy; for , neither BP nor any other algorithm can label the nodes better than chance, and indeed no algorithm can distinguish the network from an ER graph with high probability. This transition was recently established rigorously in the case  mossel2012stochastic ; massoulie2013community ; mossel2013proof .

For larger numbers of groups, the situation is more complicated. For , in the assortative case, this detectability transition coincides with the Kesten-Stigum bound kesten_stigum_1 ; kesten_stigum_2 . For the Kesten-Stigum bound marks a conjectured transition to a “hard but detectable” phase where community detection is still possible but takes exponential time, while the detectability transition is at a larger value of ; that is, the thresholds for reconstruction and robust reconstruction become different. Our claim is that our algorithm succeeds down to the Kesten-Stigum bound, i.e., throughout the detectable regime for and the easily detectable regime for .

In Fig. 2 we compare the behavior of our BP algorithm on ER graphs and a network generated by the SBM in the detectable regime. Both graphs have the same size and average degree . For the ER graph (left) there are just two phases, separated by a transition at : the paramagnetic phase where BP converges to a factorized fixed point where every node is equally likely to be in every group, and the spin glass phase where replica symmetry is broken, and BP fails to converge. The convergence time diverges at the transition. Note that in the spin glass phase, the retrieval modularity returned by BP fluctuates wildly as BP jumps from one local optimum to another, and has little meaning. In any case BP assumes replica symmetry, which is incorrect in this phase.

In contrast, the SBM network in Fig. 2 (right) has strong community structure. In addition to the paramagnetic and spin glass phases, there is now a retrieval phase in a range of , where BP finds a retrieval state describing statistically significant community structure. The retrieval modularity jumps sharply at when we first enter this phase, and then increases gently to as increases; for comparison, the modularity of the planted partition is . When we enter the spin glass phase at , the retrieval modularity fluctuates as in the ER graph. The convergence time diverges at both phase transitions.

We can compute two of these transition points analytically by analyzing the linear stability of the factorized fixed point (see Methods). Stability against random perturbations gives

 β∗(q,c)=log(q√c−1+1), (3)

and stability against correlated perturbations gives

 βR(q,c,ϵ)=log(q(1+(q−1)ϵ)c(1−ϵ)−(1+(q−1)ϵ)+1). (4)

These cross at the Kesten-Stigum bound, where . We do not currently have an analytic expression for .

In Fig. 3 (left) we show the phase diagram of our algorithm on SBM networks, including the paramagnetic, retrieval, and spin glass phases as a function of , with and . The boundary between the paramagnetic and retrieval phases is in excellent agreement with our expression (4). For , our algorithm finds a retrieval state for . On the right, we show the accuracy of the retrieval partition , defined as its overlap with the planted partition, i.e., the fraction of nodes labeled correctly.

We emphasize that is not the optimal value of , i.e., it is not on the Nishimori line iba1999 ; NishimoriBook01 ; Montanari08 . However, the optimal depends on the parameters of the SBM (see Appendix). Our claim is that setting in our algorithm succeeds throughout the easily-detectable regime, even when the parameters are unknown. In Fig. 3 (right) we compare our algorithm with that of decelle-etal-prl ; decelle-etal-pre

, which learns the SBM parameters using an expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm. Our algorithm provides nearly the same overlap, without the need for the EM loop.

### i.2 Results on real-world networks and choosing the number of groups

We tested our algorithm on a number of real-world networks. As for networks generated by the SBM in the detectable regime, we find a retrieval phase between the paramagnetic and spin glass phases (see figure in Appendix). Rather than attempting to learn the optimal parameters or temperature for these networks, we simply set as defined in (3) where is the ground-truth number of groups (if known) and is the average degree. Again, this value of is not optimal, and varying may improve the algorithm’s performance; however, setting appears to work well in practice.

When the number of groups is not known, determining it is a classic model-selection problem. The maximum modularity typically grows with . In contrast, the retrieval modularity stops growing when exceeds the correct value, giving us a principled method of choosing (see Appendix). For those networks where is known, we found that this procedure agrees perfectly with the ground truth.

As shown in Table 1, our algorithm finds a retrieval state in all these networks, with high retrieval modularity and high overlap with the ground truth. For the Gnutella, Epinions and web-Google networks, no ground truth is known; but in contrast with leskovec2009community , our algorithm finds significant large-scale communities.

While most of these networks are assortative, one network in the table, the adjacency network of common adjectives and nouns in the novel David Copperfield PhysRevE.74.036104 , is disassortative, since nouns are more likely to be adjacent to adjectives than other nouns and vice versa. In this case, we found a retrieval state with negative modularity, and high overlap with the ground truth, by setting to .

### i.3 Results on hierarchical clustering

Many networks appear to have hierarchical structure with communities and subcommunities on many scales clauset2004finding ; clauset2008hierarchical ; sales2007extracting ; PhysRevE.74.036104 ; peixoto2013hierarchical . We can look for such structures by working recursively: we determine the optimal number of groups, divide the network into subgraphs, and apply the algorithm to each one. We stop dividing when there is no retrieval state, indicating that the remaining subgraphs have no significant internal structure.

For networks generated by the SBM, each subgraph is an ER graph. Our algorithm finds no retrieval state in the subgraphs, so it stops after one level of divisioin. The same occurs in some small real-world networks, e.g. Zachary’s karate club. In some larger real-world networks, on the other hand, our algorithm repeatedly finds a retrieval state in the subgraphs, suggesting a deep hierarchical structure.

An example is the network of political blogs adamic2005political . Our algorithm first finds two large communities corresponding to liberals and conservatives, and agreeing with the ground-truth labels on of the nodes. But as shown in Fig. 4, it splits these into subcommunities, eventually finding a hierarchy levels deep with a total of subgroups (the shaded leaves of the tree in Fig. 4). We show the adjacency matrix with nodes ordered by this final partition on the right of Fig. 4, and the hierarchical structure is clearly visible. The modularity of the 2nd through 5th levels are , , , and respectively. This decreasing modularity may explain why the algorithm did not immediately split the network all the way down to the sub-communities.

A nested SBM was used to explore hierarchical structure in peixoto2013hierarchical , where the blog network was also reported to have hierarchical structure. Our results are slightly different, giving rather than subgroups, but the first levels of subdivision are similar.

### i.4 Comparison with other algorithms

In this section we compare the performance of our algorithm with two popular algorithms: Louvain blondel2008fast and OSLOM Lancichinetti-plosone . In particular, OSLOM tries to focus on statistically significant communities.

Louvain gives partitions with similar modularity as our algorithm, but with a much larger number of groups, particularly on large networks. For example, on the Gnutella and Epinions network leskovec2009community , our algorithm finds and groups with modularity and respectively, while the Louvain method finds and groups with modularity and respectively. Thus our algorithm finds large-scale communities, with a modularity similar to the smaller communities found by Louvain. Of course, we emphasize that maximizing the modularity is not our goal: finding statistically significant communities is.

We show results on synthetic networks in Fig. 5. On the left, we apply Louvain, OSLOM, and our algorithm to SBM networks with . We compute the normalized mutual information (NMI) danon2005 between the inferred partition and the planted one. (We use the NMI rather than the overlap because the number of groups given by OSLOM and Louvain are very different from the planted partition.) For Louvain and OSLOM, the NMI drops off well below the detectability transition. On the right, we show the number of groups that each algorithm infers for an ER graph with . Our algorithm correctly chooses , recognizing that this network has no internal structure. The other algorithms overfit, inferring a number of communities that grows with . In the Appendix we report on experiments on benchmark networks with heavy-tailed degree distributions LFR-benchmark , with similar results.

## Ii Discussion

We have presented a physics-based method for finding statistically significant communities. Rather than using an explicit generative or graphical model, it uses a popular measure of community structure, namely the modularity. It does not attempt to maximize the modularity, which is both computationally difficult and prone to overfitting. Instead it estimates the marginals of the Gibbs distribution using a scalable BP algorithm derived from the cavity method (see next section), and defines the retrieval partition by assigning each node to its most-likely community according to these marginals.

In essence, the algorithm looks for the consensus of many partitions with high modularity. When this consensus exists, it indicates statistically significant community structure, as opposed to random fluctuations. Moreover, by testing for the existence of this retrieval state, as opposed to a spin glass state where the algorithm fluctuates between many unrelated local optima, we can determine the correct number of groups, and decompose a network hierarchically.

We note that this algorithm is related to BP for the degree-corrected stochastic block model (DCSBM). Specifically, for a fixed , the modularity is linearly related to the log-likelihood of the DCSBM with particular parameters (see Appendix). However, our algorithm does not have to learn the parameters of the block model with an EM algorithm, or perform model selection between the stochastic block model and its degree-corrected variant yan2012model . To be clear,

is still a tunable parameter that can be optimized, but the heuristic value

appears to work well for a wide range of networks.

In addition to the detectability transition in the SBM, another well-known barrier to community detection is the resolution limit Fortunato2007 where communities become difficult to find when their size is or less. In the Appendix, we give some evidence that our hierarchical clustering algorithm overcomes this barrier. Namely, for the classic example of a ring of cliques, at the second level our algorithm divides the graph precisely into these cliques.

Another recent proposal for determining the number of groups is to use the number of real eigenvalues of the non-backtracking matrix, outside the bulk of the spectrum

Krzakala24122013 . For some networks, such as the political blogs, this gives a larger number than the we found here; it may be that, in some sense, this method detects not just top-level communities, but subcommunities deeper in the hierarchy. It would be interesting to perform a detailed comparison of the two methods.

Our approach can be extended to generalizations of the modularity, where the graph is weighted, or where a parameter represents the relative importance of the expected number of internal edges reichardt2006statistical . Finally, it would be interesting to apply BP to other objective functions, such as normalized cut or conductance, devising Hamiltonians from them and considering the resulting Gibbs distributions.

Finally, we note that rather than running BP once and using the resulting marginals, we could use decimation MMBook to fix the labels of the most biased nodes, run BP again to update the marginals, and so on. This would increase the running time of the algorithm, but it may improve its performance. Another approach would be reinforcement MMBook , where we add external fields that point toward the likely configuration. We leave this for future work.

## Iii Methods

### iii.1 Defining statistical significance

As described above, an ER random graph has many partitions with high modularity. However, these partitions are nearly uncorrelated with each other. In the language of disordered materials, the landscape of partitions is glassy: while the optimal one might be unique, there are many others whose modularity is almost as high, but which have a large Hamming distance from the optimum and from each other. If we define a Gibbs distribution on the partitions, we encounter either a paramagnetic state where the marginals are uniform, or a spin glass with replica symmetry breaking where we jump between local optima. In either case, focusing on any one of these optima is simply overfitting.

For networks such as on the right of Fig. 1, in contrast, there are many high-modularity partitions that are correlated with each other, and with the ground truth. As a result, the landscape has a smooth valley surrounding the ground truth. At a suitable temperature, the Gibbs distribution is in a retrieval phase with both low energy (high modularity) and high entropy, giving it a lower free energy than the paramagnetic state, with its marginals biased towards the ground truth. When BP converges to a fixed point, it finds a (local) minimum of the Bethe free energy, approximating this lower free energy phase.

We propose the existence of this retrieval phase as a physics-based definition of statistical significance. When it exists, the retrieval partition defined by the maximum marginals is an optimal prediction for which nodes belong to which groups.

The idea of using the free energy to separate real community structure from random noise, and using the Gibbs marginals to define a partition, also appeared in decelle-etal-prl ; decelle-etal-pre . However, that work is based on a specific generative model, namely the stochastic block model, and the energy is (minus) the log-likelihood of the observed network. In contrast, we avoid explicit generative models, and focus directly on the modularity as a measure of community structure.

### iii.2 The cavity method and belief propagation

Our goal is to compute the marginal probability distribution that each node belongs to a given group and the free energy of the Gibbs distribution. We could do this using a Monte Carlo Markov Chain algorithm. However, to obtain marginals we would need many independent samples, and to obtain the free energy we would need to sample at many different temperatures. Thus MCMC is prohibitively slow for our purposes.

Instead, for sparse networks, we can use Belief Propagation Yedidia_etal_TR2001-22 , known in statistical physics as the cavity method MP01 . BP makes a conditional independence assumption, which is exact only on trees; however, in the regimes we will consider (the detectable regime of the stochastic block model, and typical real-world graphs), its estimates of the marginals are quite accurate. It also provides an estimate of the free energy, called the Bethe free energy, which is a function of one- and two-point marginals.

BP works with “messages” : these are estimates, sent from node to node , of the marginal probability that based on ’s interactions with nodes . The update equations for these messages are as follows:

 ψi→kt∝exp⎡⎣−βdi2mθt+∑j∈∂i∖klog(1+ψj→it(eβ−1))⎤⎦. (5)

Here denotes the set of ’s neighbors, and denotes an external field acting on nodes in group , which we update after each BP iteration. We refer to the Appendix for detailed derivations of the BP update equations and Bethe free energy.

For groups and edges, each iteration of (13) takes time . If is fixed this is linear in the number of edges, and linear in the number of nodes when the network is sparse (i.e., when the average degree is constant). Moreover, these updates can be easily parallelized. Empirically, the number of iterations required to converge appears to depend very weakly on the network size, although in some cases it must grow at least logarithmically.

### iii.3 The factorized solution and local stability

Observe that the factorized solution, , where each node is equally likely to be in each possible group, is always a fixed point of (13). If BP converges to this solution, we cannot label the nodes better than chance, and the retrieval modularity is zero. This is the paramagnetic state.

There are two other possibilities: BP fails to converge, or it converges to a non-factorized fixed point, which we call the retrieval state. In the latter case, we can compute the marginals by

 ψit∝exp⎡⎣−βdi2mθt+∑j∈∂ilog(1+ψj→it(eβ−1))⎤⎦, (6)

and define the retrieval partition that assigns each node to its most-likely community. This partition represents the consensus of the Gibbs distribution: it indicates that there are many high-modularity partitions that are correlated with each other. The retrieval modularity is then a good measure of the extent to which the network has statistically significant community structure.

On the other hand, if BP does not converge, this means that neither the factorized solution nor any other fixed point is locally stable; the spin glass susceptibility diverges, and replica symmetry is broken. In other words, the space of partitions breaks into an exponential number of clusters, and BP jumps from one to another. The retrieval partition obtained using the current marginals will change to a very different partition if we run BP a bit longer, or if we perturb the initial BP messages slightly. In the spin glass phase, we are free to define a retrieval modularity from the current marginals, but it fluctuates rapidly, and does not represent a consensus of many partitions.

The linear stability of the factorized solution can be characterized by computing the derivatives of messages with respect to each other at the factorized fixed point. Using (13), we find that where is the matrix

 (7)

Its largest eigenvalue (in magnitude) is

 λ=eβ−1eβ−1+q. (8)

On locally tree-like graphs with Poisson degree distributions and average degree , the factorized fixed point is then unstable with respect to random noise whenever . This is also known as the de Almeida-Thouless local stability condition AlmeidaThouless78 , the Kesten-Stigum bound kesten_stigum_1 ; kesten_stigum_2 , or the threshold for census or robust reconstruction MM06 ; janson2004robust . In our case, it shows that must exceed a critical given by (3). If the network has some other degree distribution but is otherwise random, (3) holds where is the average excess degree, i.e., the expected number of additional neighbors of the endpoint of a random edge.

If there is no statistically significant community structure, then BP has just two phases, the paramagnetic one and the spin glass: for it converges to the factorized fixed point, and for it doesn’t converge at all. On the other hand, if there are statistically significant communities, then BP converges to a retrieval state in the range . Typically and is in the retrieval phase, since even if the factorized fixed point is locally stable, BP can still converge to a retrieval state if its free energy is lower than that of paramagnetic solution. Thus we can test for statistically significant communities by running BP at . Note that our calculation of in (3) assumes that the network is random conditioned on its degree distribution; in principle could fall outside the retrieval phase for real-world networks. In that case, our heuristic method of setting fails, and it would be necessary to scan values of in the vicinity of for the retrieval state.

To estimate , we again consider the linear stability of BP around the factorized fixed point; but now we consider arbitrary perturbations, as opposed to random noise. Let be the matrix defined in (7). The matrix of derivatives of all

messages with respect to each other is a tensor product

, where is the non-backtracking matrix Krzakala24122013 . The adaptive external field in the BP equations suppresses eigenvectors where every node is in the same community. As a result, the relevant eigenvalue is where is the largest eigenvalue of , and is the second-largest eigenvalue of , and the factorized fixed point is unstable whenever . For networks generated by the SBM, we have Krzakala24122013

 μ=c(1−ϵ)1+(q−1)ϵ. (9)

Combining this with (8) and setting gives eq. (4).

However, this assumes that the corresponding eigenvector of is correlated with the community structure, so that perturbing BP away from the factorized fixed point will lead to the retrieval state. This is true as long as is outside the bulk of ’s eigenvalues, which are confined to a disk of radius in the complex plane Krzakala24122013 ; if it is inside the bulk, then the community structure is washed out by isotropic eigenvectors and becomes hard to find. Thus the communities are detectable as long as . This is equivalent to , or equivalently . Thus the retrieval state exists all the way down to the Kesten-Stigum transition where , , and . At that point, the relevant eigenvalue crosses into the bulk, and the retrieval phase disappears.

We note that the paramagnetic, retrieval, and spin glass states were also studied in hu2012phase , using a generalized Potts model and a heat bath MCMC algorithm. However, their Hamiltonian depends on a tunable cut-size parameter, rather than on a general measure of community structure such as the modularity. Moreover, it is difficult to obtain analytical results on phase transitions using MCMC algorithms, while the stability of BP fixed points is quite tractable.

### iii.4 Defining the spin glass phase

While we have identified the spin glass phase with the non-convergence of belief propagation, the true phase diagram is potentially more complicated. The spin glass phase is defined by the divergence of the spin glass susceptibility. If this phase appears continuously, then in sparse problems this is equivalent to the sensitivity of the BP messages to noise, i.e., whether it converges to a stable fixed point. However, if the spin glass phase appears discontinuously, it could be that BP converges even though the true susceptibility diverges (see e.g. Zdeborova2009 ).

We expect this to happen above the Nishimori line when the “hard but detectable” phase exists decelle-etal-pre , when there is a retrieval state with lower free energy than the factorized fixed point but with an exponentially small basin of attraction, so that BP starting with random messages fails to converge to the true minimum of the free energy. Detecting this spin glass phase would require us to go beyond the replica-symmetric BP equations used here to equations with one-step replica symmetry breaking MMBook . In the assortative case of the stochastic block model, the hard-but-detectable phase exists for . Happily, the corresponding range of parameters is quite narrow; nevertheless, more work on this needs to be done.

A C++ implementation can be found at code .

###### Acknowledgements.
We are grateful to Silvio Franz, Florent Krzakala, Mark Newman, Federico Ricci-Tersenghi, Christophe Schulke, and Lenka Zdeborová for helpful discussions, and to Tiago de Paula Peixoto for drawing Fig. 4 (left) using his software at http://graph-tool.skewed.de/. This work was supported by AFOSR and DARPA under grant FA9550-12-1-0432.

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## Appendix A Belief Propagation equation and Bethe free energy

In this section we derive the BP update equations appearing in the main text. BP works with “messages” : these are estimates, sent from node to node , of the marginal probability that based on ’s interactions with nodes . If the Hamiltonian is , the update equations for these messages are as follows:

 ψi→kt =1Zi→k∏j∈∂i∖kq∑s=1eβδstψj→is∏j≠i,kq∑s=1e−βdidj2mδstψj→is =1Zi→k∏j∈∂i∖k(1+ψj→it(eβ−1))∏j≠i,k(1+ψj→it(e−βdidj2m−1)). (10)

Here is simply a normalization factor, and denotes the neighborhood of node . The BP estimate of the marginal probability is then

 ψit =1Zi∏j∈∂iq∑s=1eβδstψj→is∏j≠iq∑s=1e−βdidj2mδstψj→is =1Zi∏j∈∂i(1+ψj→it(eβ−1))∏j≠i(1+ψj→it(e−βdidj2m−1)), (11)

which is the same as (A) except that we remove the condition . We can also estimate the two-point marginals, and in particular, the probability that two neighboring points belong to the same group. If , the BP estimate of the probability that and is

 ψijst=1Zijeβδstψj→isψi→jt. (12)

The update equations (A) involve messages: every node interacts with every other one, not just their neighbors. However, in the sparse case we can simplify the effect of non-neighbors, by replacing them with an external field as in decelle-etal-prl ; decelle-etal-pre . If and , we have

 ψit=ψi→kt∑se−βdidk2mδstψk→is≈ψi→kt(1−βdidk2mψk→it)≈ψi→kt.

In that case, we can identify the messages that sends to its non-neighbors with its marginal . Then (A) simplifies to

 ψi→kt =1Zi→k∏j∈∂i∖k(1+ψj→it(eβ−1))∏j≠i,k(1+ψjt(e−βdidj2m−1)) ≈1Zi→kexp⎛⎝−βdi2mθt+∑j∈∂i∖klog(1+ψj→it(eβ−1))⎞⎠, (13)

where

 θt=n∑j=1djψjt (14)

denotes an external field acting on nodes in group , which we update after each BP iteration. Iterating (13) now has computational complexity , which is linear in the number of edges when is fixed.

The Bethe free energy of a BP fixed point is a function of the messages:

 (15)

where and are the normalization constants for the one- and two-point marginals appearing in (11) and (12). BP fixed points are also stationary points of the Bethe free energy Yedidia_etal_TR2001-22 .

Observe that the factorized solution, , where each node is equally likely to be in each possible group, is always a fixed point of the BP equations (13). Assuming it does not get stuck in a local minimum, BP converges to a retrieval state whenever its Bethe free energy is less than that of the factorized state. If the network has average degree , this is simply

 ffactBethe=−1β(logq+c2log(1−1q+eβq)−cβ2q).

In Fig. 6 we compare the free energy, convergence time, and retrieval modularity for networks generated by the stochastic block model at three different values of , alongside an Erdős-Rényi graph of the same average degree . For small enough , their free energies are all equal to , since they are all in the paramagnetic phase. For each value of , there is a critical at which the free energy splits off from the others, where makes a transition to a retrieval state with . The retrieval modularity jumps to a nonzero value, indicating community structure, and the convergence time diverges at the transition. For the Erdős-Rényi graph, the apparent modularity also jumps, but at it enters the spin glass phase rather than the retrieval phase: BP fails to converge and the retrieval modularity fluctuates, indicating partitions that are uncorrelated with each other.

## Appendix B Relation with the degree-corrected stochastic block model

The degree-corrected stochastic block model (DCSBM) was introduced in karrer-newman to overcome the fact that the SBM typically places low-degree and high-degree vertices into different groups, since it expects the degree distribution within each group to be Poisson. The DCSBM’s parameters are the expected node degrees and a matrix of parameters . Given a partition , the number of edges between each pair

is Poisson-distributed with mean

. In the simple graph case where if and otherwise, the log-likelihood of the network is then

 L({t}) =logP(G|{ωab},{t}) =log⎛⎝∏⟨ij⟩∈Edidjωtitj∏⟨ij⟩e−didjωtitj⎞⎠. (16)

If for and for , the likelihood can be written as

 L =∑⟨ij⟩(log(didjωout)−didjωout)+(logωinωout)⎡⎣∑⟨ij⟩∈Eδtitj−ωin−ωoutlog(ωin% /ωout)∑⟨ij⟩didjδtitj⎤⎦. (17)

Comparing with the definition of modularity, if we set and such that

 β=logωinωoutand2m=log(ωin/ωout)ωin−ωout, (18)

then the second term in (17) is . Since the first term in (17) does not depend on , we have

 eL({t})∝eβmQ({t}),

and the Gibbs distribution is exactly the Gibbs distribution of partitions in the DCSBM.

Thus, for any fixed , there are parameters of the DCSBM such that these distributions have the same free energy and the same ground state. Belief propagation on the DCSBM was described in yan2012model , and one can optimize the parameters through an expectation-maximization algorithm analogous to decelle-etal-pre ; decelle-etal-prl . However, our approach is different in several ways.

• We define community structure directly in terms of a classic measure, the modularity, as opposed to the log-likelihood of a generative model.

• Rather than having to fit the parameters of the DCSBM with an EM algorithm, we have a single temperature parameter . We can usually detect communities by setting as in main text; at worst, we just have to a scan a small region.

• For real-world networks the retrieval modularity appears to be a good guide to the number of groups , while the free energy of the (DC)SBM continues to decrease for .

• Our approach appears to work equally well for networks with Poisson degree distributions (generated by the SBM) and those with heavy-tailed degree distributions, such as the LFR benchmark LFR-benchmark and the network of political blogs, where the DCSBM does much better karrer-newman . In particular, we have no need to do model selection between SBM and DCSBM, as was done using the Bethe free energy in yan2012model .

## Appendix C The Nishimori line and the optimal temperature

When data is produced by an underlying generative model, inference of the latent parameters can be done optimally along the Nishimori line iba1999 ; NishimoriBook01 , where the Gibbs distribution is exactly the posterior distribution of the latent parameters (in this case the group labels or partitions). If the network is generated by the DCSBM, then (18) gives a that corresponds to the correct parameters at Nishimori line. Determining the parameters, and therefore , could be done with an EM algorithm as in decelle-etal-prl ; decelle-etal-pre , but our goal is to avoid this additional learning step. Moreover, if the network is not actually generated by the DCSBM, there is a priori no value of that corresponds to the Nishimori line, and no way to determine the optimal without access to the ground truth.

However, for synthetic networks generated by the SBM, we can construct an approximate Nishimori line by omitting the difference between the SBM and the DCSBM, by assuming that the expected degrees are actually the same. This gives

 βNishimori=log(cin/cout)=−logϵ.

In Fig. 7 we show the phase diagram from the main text with this approximate Nishimori line added. It passes through the critical point (one can check analytically that ) and that it avoids the spin-glass phase, passing directly from the paramagnetic phase to the retrieval phase. This recovers the fact that replica symmetry breaking cannot occur on the Nishimori line Montanari08 .

## Appendix D Choosing the number of groups

Choosing the number of groups in a network is a classic model selection problem. Setting by maximizing the modularity is a widely-used heuristic in the network literature; however, as we have already seen, it is prone to overfitting. For example, the maximum modularity for an Erdős-Rényi graph is an increasing function of , while the correct model has . Similarly, in the stochastic block model the likelihood increases, or the ground state energy decreases, until every node is assigned to its own group.

One approach decelle-etal-prl ; decelle-etal-pre is to use the free energy rather than the ground state energy. In essence, the entropic term penalizes overfitting, and gives us the total likelihood of the model summed over all partitions, as opposed to the likelihood of the best partition. This approach works well on synthetic graphs: the free energy decreases until we reach the correct number of groups, after which it stays roughly constant. However, on real-world networks the free energy continues to decrease with , for example as shown in Fig. 8 of decelle-etal-pre . Thus, for networks not generated by the SBM, it is not clear that this method works.

Here we propose to use the retrieval modularity as a criterion for choosing . Namely, we claim that increases with until we reach the correct value . For , either stays the same, or the retrieval phase disappears and we enter the spin glass phase. In Fig. 8 we plot and BP convergence time for the karate club network with different values of . With , i.e., the ground-truth number of groups, the retrieval phase is very large. For larger , the retrieval phase becomes narrower, and does not increase. Note the similarity with Fig. 2 (right) in the main text.

In Fig. 9, we plot for different values of as a function of for three networks with known community structure: a synthetic network generated by the SBM with , the karate club with  zachary1977information , and a network of political books with  polbooks . In each case, stops growing at , and is nearly independent of throughout the retrieval phase. (To deal with fluctuations, in practice we do not increase q unless the retrieval modularity increases by at least some threshold value.) Thus our method gives the correct number of communities, rather than overfitting.

Note that here refers to the top level of organization in the network. In the main text, we discuss using our approach to recursively divide communities into subcommunities. In that case, we use this procedure to determine the number of subcommunities we should split the network into at each stage, and stop splitting when we reach communities with .

## Appendix E Additional comparisons with Louvain and OSLOM

In Fig. 10 we show comparisons between our BP algorithm, Louvain blondel2008fast , and OSLOM Lancichinetti-plosone on networks with power-law degree distributions. On the left, the graphs are generated by the LFR benchmark process LFR-benchmark . We show the normalized mutual information danon2005 as a function of the mixing parameter . As for the SBM graphs shown in the main text, there is a parameter range where BP achieves a higher NMI than the other algorithms. On the right, we show results for a network with no community structure, where the degree distribution follows a power law with exponent . While BP correctly chooses as the number of groups, the other algorithms overfit, finding a number of communities that grows with the network size. These results are similar to those shown in Fig. 5 of the main text.

## Appendix F The resolution limit

In this section we describe results of our algorithm on the ring-of-cliques network, which is the standard example of the resolution limit Fortunato2007 . This network has size ; it consists of cliques, each of which is composed of nodes, and which are connected to the neighboring cliques by a single link. Thus the intuitively correct partition of the network puts each clique into one group. However, when is sufficiently small compared to , maximizing the modularity forces us to combine multiple cliques Fortunato2007 . For example, if and , the correct partition with groups has modularity , while the division with groups of cliques each has modularity . As a consequence, maximizing the modularity fails to divide the network correctly into the cliques.

In Fig. 11 we plot the dendrogram obtained by our hierarchical clustering algorithm starting from different initial conditions (from top to bottom). All three dendrograms have levels below the root. The first split creates groups consisting of multiple cliques, but the second split correctly assigns each clique to its own group. At that point the algorithm concludes that the cliques have no internal structure, and it stops subdividing. This suggests that our hierarchical clustering algorithm may be able to avoid the resolution limit.