Community Detection on Inhomogeneous Multilayer Networks with Extreme Sparsity

Abstract: We study layer-specific community detection in an $L$-layer network ${A^{(l)}}_{l\in[L]}$ on a common set of $n$ nodes. Because modern networks are constructed from multi-modal data or with different contexts, the community labels $π^{(l)}\in[K]^n$ are layer-dependent and the degree heterogeneity parameters $θ_i^{(l)}$ vary widely across nodes and layers. The inhomogeneity and extreme sparsity raise a challenge for classical community detection methods. We propose a multilayer-assisted regularized spectral method (MARS-CD) to address this challenge. For layer $l$, MARS-CD first constructs $X^{(l)}$ from the remaining layers, so that the problem is transformed into a network-with-covariates clustering problem on $(A^{(l)}, X^{(l)})$. Then we recover $π^{(l)}$ by NAC in Hu and Wang (2024) that allows misalignment. The key component is to construct $X^{(l)}$, where we stack regularized embeddings. Building upon this, we establish the first theoretical guarantees for the quality of $X^{(l)}$ under multilayer networks with extreme sparsity. These further lead to weak and strong consistency for recovering $π^{(l)}$. We further develop an optional label alignment step to interpret the shared community structure across layers. Simulations demonstrate the superior performance of our MARS-CD method. Applying MARS-CD to international food trading networks provides an interpretable product-specific community structure.