Scalable Community Detection in Massive Networks using Aggregated Relational Data

The analysis of networks is used in many fields of study including statistics, social science, computer sciences, physics, and biology. The interest in networks is diverse as it usually depends on the field of study. For instance, social scientists are interested in interpreting how edges arise, while biologists seek to understand underlying biological processes. Among the problems being explored in network analysis, community detection stands out as being one of the most important. Community detection seeks to find groups of nodes with a large concentration of links within but few between. Inferring groups are important in many applications as they are used for further downstream analysis. For example, identifying clusters of consumers with similar purchasing behavior in a customer and product network can be used to create better recommendation systems. Finding a node with a high concentration of its edges to other nodes in the community may give insight into how the community formed. Many statistical models for networks implicitly define the notion of a community. Statistical inference aims to fit a model that posits how vertices are connected to each other. One of the most commo