Statistical inference for community detection in signed networks.

The problem of community detection in networks has received wide attention and proves to be computationally challenging. In recent years, with the surge of signed networks with positive links and negative links, to find community structure in such signed networks has become a research focus in the area of network science. Although many methods have been proposed to address the problem, their performance seriously depends on the predefined optimization objectives or heuristics which are usually difficult to accurately describe the intrinsic structure of community. In this study, we present a statistical inference method for community detection in signed networks, in which a probabilistic model is proposed to model signed networks and the expectation-maximization-based parameter estimation method is deduced to find communities in signed networks. In addition, to efficiently analyze signed networks without any a priori information, a model selection criterion is also proposed to automatically determine the number of communities. In our experiments, the proposed method is tested in the synthetic and real-word signed networks and compared with current methods. The experimental results show the proposed method can more efficiently and accurately find the communities in signed networks than current methods. Notably, the proposed method is a mathematically principled method.