Detecting a community in a network is a matter of discerning the distinct features and connections of a group of members that are different from those in other communities. The ability to do this is of great significance in network analysis. However, beyond the classic spectral clustering and statistical inference methods, there have been significant developments with deep learning techniques for community detection in recent years--particularly when it comes to handling high-dimensional network data. Hence, a comprehensive review of the latest progress in community detection through deep learning is timely. To frame the survey, we have devised a new taxonomy covering different state-of-the-art methods, including deep learning models based on deep neural networks (DNNs), deep nonnegative matrix factorization, and deep sparse filtering. The main category, i.e., DNNs, is further divided into convolutional networks, graph attention networks, generative adversarial networks, and autoencoders. The popular benchmark datasets, evaluation metrics, and open-source implementations to address experimentation settings are also summarized. This is followed by a discussion on the practical applications of community detection in various domains. The survey concludes with suggestions of challenging topics that would make for fruitful future research directions in this fast-growing deep learning field.

Community detection, a fundamental task for network analysis, aims to partition a network into multiple sub-structures to help reveal their latent functions. Community detection has been extensively studied in and broadly applied to many real-world network problems. Classical approaches to community detection typically utilize probabilistic graphical models and adopt a variety of prior knowledge to infer community structures. As the problems that network methods try to solve and the network data to be analyzed become increasingly more sophisticated, new approaches have also been proposed and developed, particularly those that utilize deep learning and convert networked data into low dimensional representation. Despite all the recent advancement, there is still a lack of insightful understanding of the theoretical and methodological underpinning of community detection, which will be critically important for future development of the area of network analysis. In this paper, we develop and present a unified architecture of network community-finding methods to characterize the state-of-the-art of the field of community detection. Specifically, we provide a comprehensive review of the existing community detection methods and introduce a new taxonomy that divides the existing methods into two categories, namely probabilistic graphical model and deep learning. We then discuss in detail the main idea behind each method in the two categories. Furthermore, to promote future development of community detection, we release several benchmark datasets from several problem domains and highlight their applications to various network analysis tasks. We conclude with discussions of the challenges of the field and suggestions of possible directions for future research.

Sequential recommendation aims to capture users' dynamic preferences, in which data sparsity is a key problem. Most contrastive learning models leverage data augmentation to address this problem, but they amplify noises in original sequences. Contrastive learning has the assumption that two views (positive pairs) obtained from the same user behavior sequence must be similar. However, noises typically disturb the user's main intention, which results in the dissimilarity of two views. To address this problem, in this work, we formalize the denoising problem by selecting the user's main intention, and apply contrastive learning for the first time under this topic, i.e., we propose a novel framework, namely Multi-Intention Oriented Contrastive Learning Recommender (IOCRec). In order to create high-quality views with intent-level, we fuse local and global intentions to unify sequential patterns and intent-level self-supervision signals. Specifically, we design the sequence encoder in IOCRec which includes three modules: local module, global module and disentangled module. The global module can capture users' global preferences, which is independent of the local module. The disentangled module can obtain multi-intention behind global and local representations. From a fine-grained perspective, IOCRec separates different intentions to guide the denoising process. Extensive experiments on four widely-used real datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our new method for sequential recommendation.

Community detection is important for understanding networks. Previous studies observed that communities are not necessarily disjoint and might overlap. It is also agreed that some outlier vertices participate in no community, and some hubs in a community might take more important roles than others. Each of these facts has been independently addressed in previous work. But there is no algorithm, to our knowledge, that can identify these three structures altogether. To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel model where vertices are measured by their centrality in communities, and define the identification of overlapping communities, hubs, and outliers as an optimization problem, calculated by nonnegative matrix factorization. We test this method on various real networks, and compare it with several competing algorithms. The experimental results not only demonstrate its ability of identifying overlapping communities, hubs, and outliers, but also validate its superior performance in terms of clustering quality.

Heterogeneous information networks (HINs) are potent models of complex systems. In practice, many nodes in an HIN have their attributes unspecified, resulting in significant performance degradation for supervised and unsupervised representation learning. We developed an unsupervised heterogeneous graph contrastive learning approach for analyzing HINs with missing attributes (HGCA). HGCA adopts a contrastive learning strategy to unify attribute completion and representation learning in an unsupervised heterogeneous framework. To deal with a large number of missing attributes and the absence of labels in unsupervised scenarios, we proposed an augmented network to capture the semantic relations between nodes and attributes to achieve a fine-grained attribute completion. Extensive experiments on three large real-world HINs demonstrated the superiority of HGCA over several state-of-the-art methods. The results also showed that the complemented attributes by HGCA can improve the performance of existing HIN models.