Provable Overlapping Community Detection in Weighted Graphs

Community detection is a widely-studied unsupervised learning problem in which the task is to group similar entities together based on observed pairwise entity interactions. This problem has applications in diverse domains such as social network analysis and computational biology. There is a significant amount of literature studying this problem under the assumption that the communities do not overlap. When the communities are allowed to overlap, often a pure nodes assumption is made, i.e. each community has a node that belongs exclusively to that community. This assumption, however, may not always be satisfied in practice. In this paper, we provide a provable method to detect overlapping communities in weighted graphs without explicitly making the pure nodes assumption. Moreover, contrary to most existing algorithms, our approach is based on convex optimization, for which many useful theoretical properties are already known. We demonstrate the success of our algorithm on artificial and real-world datasets.