Three-Toed Sloth

"Community Detection and Link Prediction in Networks" (Next Week at the Statistics Seminar)

Attention conservation notice: Only interesting if you (1) care about dividing networks into cohesive sub-networks in a statistically principled manner, and (2) will be in Pittsburgh next Monday afternoon.

As someone who is deeply interested in community discovery, and has admired her work for many years, I am extra pleased to announce next week's speaker and her subject:

Liza Levina, "Community detection and link prediction in networks"

Abstract: Analysis of networks and in particular discovering communities in networks has been a focus of recent work in several fields, with diverse applications including social networks, food webs, and security. Nonetheless, there is a certain amount of disconnect between the many algorithms proposed for community detection, the probability models for random graphs that are simple enough to be tractable, and the complex features we observe in real networks. The talk discusses a number of methods and models for community detection under a general asymptotic framework which allows us to evaluate and compare methods in terms of consistency. Various algorithms for fitting the models and empirical results on a number of artificial and real networks will also be discussed. The second part of the talk will focus on link prediction in partially observed noisy networks.

Time and place: 4--5 pm on Monday, 22 October 2012, the Adamson Wing (136) of Baker Hall

As always, the talk is free and open to the public.

Enigmas of Chance; Networks