The VI AMMCS International Conference
Waterloo, Ontario, Canada | August 14-18, 2023
AMMCS 2023 Plenary Talk
Clustering and Classification in Networks
Peter J. Mucha (Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH)
Real-world networks are neither completely random nor fully regular, frequently containing essential structural features whose identification can help better understand the nature and purpose of a network. One common task is to seek out clusters in the data, sometimes described as "community detection". In other settings, one aims to identify key network features in the data that might be used to classify whole networks, label nodes, or predict missing edges. But many of these tasks require selecting features or parameters that are not always obvious to experts in possible application domains. For example, the best use of modularity-based methods includes setting a parameter to control the resolution scale. In this talk, we demonstrate a variety of approaches for such tasks, with emphasis on best practices with readily available software packages.
Peter Mucha is the Jack Byrne Distinguished Professor in Mathematics at Dartmouth College, where he arrived in 2021 as part of The Jack Byrne Academic Cluster in Mathematics and Decision Science. Previously, he was faculty at UNC-Chapel Hill, where he served as chair of the Department of Mathematics, the founding chair of the Department of Applied Physical Sciences, and the Director of the Chairs Leadership Program at the Institute for the Arts & Humanities. His awards include a DOE Early Career PI award, an NSF CAREER award, and recognition as an HHMI Gilliam Advisor. Mucha's research includes a variety of topics in the mathematics of networks and data science, including network representations of data, community detection, and modeling dynamics on and of networks. His group's activities are fundamentally interdisciplinary, applying tools of network analysis and data science in collaborations across the mathematical, physical, life, and social sciences.