Inference of hyperedges and overlapping communities in hypergraphs

Abstract

Hypergraphs, encoding structured interactions among any number of system units, have recently proven a successful tool to describe many real-world biological and social networks. Here we propose a framework based on statistical inference to characterize the structural organization of hypergraphs. The method allows to infer missing hyperedges of any size in a principled way, and to jointly detect overlapping communities in presence of higher-order interactions. Furthermore, our model has an efficient numerical implementation, and it runs faster than dyadic algorithms on pairwise records projected from higher-order data. We apply our method to a variety of real-world systems, showing strong performance in hyperedge prediction tasks, detecting communities well aligned with the information carried by interactions, and robustness against addition of noisy hyperedges. Our approach illustrates the fundamental advantages of a hypergraph probabilistic model when modeling relational systems with higher-order interactions.

Publication
Nature Communications, Vol 13, 7229 (2022)
Martina Contisciani
Martina Contisciani
PhD student

My research focuses on the analysis of network data using statistical tools. My background is in Theoretical and Applied Statistics and I am interested in discovering new techniques, approaches and perspectives used in the analysis of data. I have been working on a project focused on modeling covariate information in community detection algorithms and I am involved in investigating the conditional independence assumption, underlying the statistical inference on network data.

Caterina De Bacco
Caterina De Bacco
CyberValley Research Group Leader

My research focuses on understanding, optimizing and predicting relations between the microscopic and macroscopic properties of complex large-scale interacting systems.

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