Boosting nonnegative matrix factorization based community detection with graph attention auto-encoder

Community detection is of great help to understand the structures and functions of complex networks. It has become one of popular research topics in the field of complex networks analysis. Due to the simplicity, flexibility, effectiveness and interpretability, Nonnegative Matrix Factorization (NMF)-based methods have been widely employed for community detection. However, most existing NMF-based community detection methods are linear and their performance is limited when facing networks with diversified structure information. In view of this, we propose a nonlinear NMF-based method named NMFGAAE, which is composed of two main modules: NMF and Graph Attention Auto-Encoder (GAAE). This approach can boost the performance of NMF-based community detection methods by the aid of graph neural networks and deep clustering. More specifically, GAAE introduces an attention mechanism directed by NMF-based community detection to learn the node representations, while NMF can simultaneously factor these representations to uncover the community structure. We design a unified framework to jointly optimize GAAE and NMF modules, which is very beneficial to obtain better community detection results. We conduct extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world networks. The results show that NMFGAAE not only performs better than state-of-the-art NMF-based community detection methods, but also outperforms some network representation based baselines.