TY - GEN A1 - Willenbockel, Christian Tobias A1 - Schütte, Christof T1 - Variational Bayesian Inference and Model Selection for the Stochastic Block Model with Irrelevant Vertices N2 - Real World networks often exhibit a significant number of vertices which are sparsely and irregularly connected to other vertices in the network. For clustering theses networks with a model based algorithm, we propose the Stochastic Block Model with Irrelevant Vertices (SBMIV) for weighted net- works. We propose an original Variational Bayesian Expectation Maximiza- tion inference algorithm for the SBMIV which is an advanced version of our Blockloading algorithm for the Stochastic Block Model. We introduce a model selection criterion for the number of clusters of the SBMIV which is based on the lower variational bound of the model likelihood. We propose a fully Bayesian inference process, based on plausible informative priors, which is independent of other algorithms for preprocessing start values for the cluster assignment of vertices. Our inference methods allow for a multi level identification of irrelevant vertices which are hard to cluster reliably ac- cording to the SBM. We demonstrate that our methods improve on the normal Stochastic Block model by applying it to to Earthquake Networks which are an example of networks with a large number of sparsely and irregularly con- nected vertices. T3 - ZIB-Report - 16-01 KW - Clustering KW - Variational Bayes EM KW - Model Selection, KW - Stochastic Block Model KW - Networks KW - unsupervised classification KW - Noise Y1 - 2016 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:0297-zib-57003 SN - 1438-0064 ER -