tadc-sbm 0.1.5

A Time-varying, Attributed, Degree-Corrected Stochastic Block Model

TADC-SBM: a Time-varying, Attributed, Degree-Corrected Stochastic Block Model

This is the code repository for the accompanying paper:

Passos, N.A.R.A., Carlini, E., Trani, S. (2025). TADC-SBM: a Time-varying, Attributed, Degree-Corrected Stochastic Block Model. 2025 IEEE Symposium on Computers and Communications (ISCC), Bologna, Italy, 2025, pp. 1-6.

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About

TADC-SBM is a synthetic dataset generator based on Ghasemian et al. (2016) and Tsitsulin et al. (2021) that produces temporal graphs with varying community structures, attribute features, and mesoscale dynamics, suited for community detection and graph representation learning benchmarks under controlled experimental settings:

where $\mathbf{B}$ is the block matrix describing the probability of an edge being created among nodes in each community and $\boldsymbol{\tau}$ is the transition matrix with the probabilities of nodes switching communities over time. Node- and edge-level attribute features are drawn from a multivariate distribution considering the node communities in either the first or the last graph snapshot, optionally representing hierarchical (nested) structures in the feature space.

Requirements

Requirements can be installed from PyPI (requirements.txt) or using conda (environment.yml).

The graph-tool library must be available in the user space: conda install -c conda-forge graph-tool.

It is not advised to install the environment from conda as-is (but you certainly may!). Instead, try the following, more flexible environment to solve. Last tested with Python 3.11 (but should work recent versions as well):

conda create -n tadcsbm -c conda-forge python=3.11 graph-tool  # tested with 2.96
conda activate tadcsbm
pip install -r requirements.txt

Alternatively, see the graph-tool documentation for other platforms and package managers, including Docker and Homebrew.

Installation

The package is available on test PyPI as tadcsbm and can be installed with:

pip install --index-url https://test.pypi.org/simple/ tadcsbm

A binary script tadc-sbm is included for command line usage, which can be run with python -m tadc-sbm or simply tadc-sbm if the package is installed. Note that it is not necessary to install the package to run the script.

Usage

To import the generator function in your code:

from tadcsbm import tadcsbm_simulator
sbm = tadcsbm_simulator(...)

An interactive example may be found in the included notebook file.

Command line

A command line interface is included to stremaline graph generation:

usage: tadc-sbm.py [-h] -n NUM_VERTICES -e NUM_EDGES -k COMMUNITIES
                   [-t SNAPSHOTS] [--eta ETA] [--gamma {0,1}]
                   [--beta EDGE_SAMPLING_RATE] [--feature-dim FEATURE_DIM]
                   [--feature-center-distance FEATURE_CENTER_DISTANCE]
                   [--feature-cluster-variance FEATURE_CLUSTER_VARIANCE]
                   [--feature-groups FEATURE_GROUPS]
                   [--edge-feature-dim EDGE_FEATURE_DIM]
                   [--edge-center-distance EDGE_CENTER_DISTANCE]
                   [--edge-cluster-variance EDGE_CLUSTER_VARIANCE]
                   [--no-reverse] [--uniform-all] [--dir OUTPUT_DIR]
                   [--ext OUTPUT_EXT]

options:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -n NUM_VERTICES, --num-vertices NUM_VERTICES
                        Number of vertices (nodes)
  -e NUM_EDGES, --num-edges NUM_EDGES
                        Number of edges per snapshot
  -k COMMUNITIES, --communities COMMUNITIES
                        Number of communities
  -t SNAPSHOTS, --snapshots SNAPSHOTS
                        Number of snapshots
  --eta ETA             Community stability factor (0.0 to 1.0)
  --gamma {0,1}         Fix transition probabilities (default: 0 for current
                        memberships)
  --beta EDGE_SAMPLING_RATE
                        Edge sampling rate (0.0 to 1.0)
  --feature-dim FEATURE_DIM
                        Dimensionality of node features
  --feature-center-distance FEATURE_CENTER_DISTANCE
                        Distance between feature clusters
  --feature-cluster-variance FEATURE_CLUSTER_VARIANCE
                        Variance of feature clusters (default: 1.0)
  --feature-groups FEATURE_GROUPS
                        Number of feature groups (default: k)
  --edge-feature-dim EDGE_FEATURE_DIM
                        Dimensionality of edge features
  --edge-center-distance EDGE_CENTER_DISTANCE
                        Distance between edge feature clusters
  --edge-cluster-variance EDGE_CLUSTER_VARIANCE
                        Variance of edge feature clusters (default: 1.0)
  --fix-probabilities   Use fixed transition probabilities (default: False)
  --no-reverse          Keep the generation order of snapshots (default:
                        reversed)
  --uniform-all         Uniform transition probabilities (i.e., including
                        current community)

Example

To generate graphs with the same configuration used in the experimental evaluation of the paper:

./tadc-sbm.py --communities 8 \
              --snapshots 8 \
              --num-vertices 1024 \
              --num-edges 10240 \
              --eta 1 \
              --gamma 0 \
              --feature-dim 32 \
              --feature-center 6.0

See the included examples directory for sample outputs used in the accompanying paper.

Varying the value of $\eta \in [0, 1]$ (--eta) produces snapshots with different community stability rates, while the value of $\gamma \in \{0, 1\}$ (--gamma) fixes the community transition probabilities for nodes in each snapshot.

Data conversion

Resulting output is saved in compressed NetworkX-compatible and NumPy formats, and may be opened with a number of libraries and tools. See also: the convert and read_graph functions from NetworkX-Temporal.

Acknowledgements

Google Research for the graph embedding simulations that TADC-SBM is based on.

Cite

In case this repository is useful for your research, kindly consider citing:

@inproceedings{tadcsbm2025,
  author={Passos, Nelson A. R. A. and Carlini, Emanuele and Trani, Salvatore},
  booktitle={2025 IEEE Symposium on Computers and Communications (ISCC)},
  title={TADC-SBM: a Time-varying, Attributed, Degree-Corrected Stochastic Block Model},
  year={2025},
  volume={},
  number={},
  pages={1-6},
  keywords={Representation learning;Systematics;Computational modeling;Perturbation methods;Stochastic processes;Transportation;Benchmark testing;Stability analysis;Recommender systems;Synthetic data;Temporal Graphs;Community Detection;Stochastic Block Modeling;Graph Representation Learning},
  doi={10.1109/ISCC65549.2025.11326334}
}