A Tensor Spectral Approach to Learning Mixed Membership Community Models

Detecting hidden communities from observed interactions is a classical problem. Theoretical analysis of community detection has so far been mostly limited to models with non-overlapping communities such as the stochastic block model. In this paper, we provide guaranteed community detection for a family of probabilistic network models with overlapping communities, termed as the mixed membership Dirichlet model, first introduced in Airoldi et al. (2008). This model allows for nodes to have fractional memberships in multiple communities and assumes that the community memberships are drawn from a Dirichlet distribution. Moreover, it contains the stochastic block model as a special case. We propose a unified approach to learning communities in these models via a tensor spectral decomposition approach. Our estimator uses low-order moment tensor of the observed network, consisting of 3-star counts. Our learning method is based on simple linear algebraic operations such as singular value decomposition and tensor power iterations. We provide guaranteed recovery of community memberships and model parameters, and present a careful finite sample analysis of our learning method. Additionally, our results match the best known scaling requirements for the special case of the (homogeneous) stochastic block model.