Regular Decomposition: an information and graph theoretic approach to stochastic block models

Abstract

A method for compression of large graphs and non-negative matrices to a block structure is proposed. Szemer\'edi's regularity lemma is used as heuristic motivation of the significance of stochastic block models. Another ingredient of the method is Rissanen's minimum description length principle (MDL). We propose practical algorithms and provide theoretical results on the accuracy of the method.