Information Theoretic Comparison of Stochastic Graph Models: Some Experiments

  • Authors:
  • Kevin J. Lang

  • Affiliations:
  • Yahoo Research, Santa Clara, CA 95054

  • Venue:
  • WAW '09 Proceedings of the 6th International Workshop on Algorithms and Models for the Web-Graph
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

The Modularity-Q measure of community structure is known to falsely ascribe community structure to random graphs, at least when it is naively applied. Although Q is motivated by a simple kind of comparison of stochastic graph models, it has been suggested that a more careful comparison in an information-theoretic framework might avoid problems like this one. Most earlier papers exploring this idea have ignored the issue of skewed degree distributions and have only done experiments on a few small graphs. By means of a large-scale experiment on over 100 large complex networks, we have found that modeling the degree distribution is essential. Once this is done, the resulting information-theoretic clustering measure does indeed avoid Q's bad property of seeing cluster structure in random graphs.