Higher-order trade-offs in hypergraph community detection

Science Advances, vol. 12, pp. eaef2184

Abstract

Extending community detection from pairwise networks to hypergraphs introduces fundamental theoretical challenges. Hypergraphs exhibit structural heterogeneity with no direct graph analog: Hyperedges of varying orders can connect nodes across communities in diverse configurations. Crucially, this means that any hypergraph community detection algorithm must make a choice regarding which order or balance of hyperedges it prefers to maintain or split during partitioning. We address these challenges by developing a unified framework for community detection in nonuniform hypergraphs under the hypergraph stochastic block model. We introduce a general signal-to-noise ratio that enables a quantitative analysis of trade-offs unique to higher-order networks, such as which hypergedges we choose to split across communities and how we choose to split them. Building on this framework, we derive a Bethe Hessian operator for nonuniform hypergraphs that provides efficient spectral clustering with principled model selection. We characterize the resulting spectral detectability threshold and compare it to belief propagation limits, showing the methods coincide for uniform hypergraphs but diverge in nonuniform settings. Synthetic experiments confirm our analytical predictions and reveal systematic biases toward preserving higher-order and balanced shape hyperedges. Application to empirical data demonstrates the practical relevance of these higher-order detectability trade-offs in real-world systems.

Authors 3

1. Jiaze Li

   Maastricht University

   Affiliation as printed

   Department of Data Analytics and Digitalisation, Maastricht University, Maastricht, Netherlands

2. Michael T. Schaub Aachen Center for Computational Life Sciences Department of Biology Department of Computer Science

   RWTH Aachen University

   Affiliation as printed

   Center for Computational Life Sciences, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany

   Department of Biology, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany

   Department of Computer Science, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany

3. Leto Peel corresponding

   Maastricht University

   Affiliation as printed

   Department of Data Analytics and Digitalisation, Maastricht University, Maastricht, Netherlands