  Complex systems in nature and in society are often represented as networks,
describing the rich set of interactions between objects of interest. Many
deterministic and probabilistic clustering methods have been developed to
analyze such structures. Given a network, almost all of them partition the
vertices into disjoint clusters, according to their connection profile.
However, recent studies have shown that these techniques were too restrictive
and that most of the existing networks contained overlapping clusters. To
tackle this issue, we present in this paper the Overlapping Stochastic Block
Model. Our approach allows the vertices to belong to multiple clusters, and, to
some extent, generalizes the well-known Stochastic Block Model [Nowicki and
Snijders (2001)]. We show that the model is generically identifiable within
classes of equivalence and we propose an approximate inference procedure, based
on global and local variational techniques. Using toy data sets as well as the
French Political Blogosphere network and the transcriptional network of
Saccharomyces cerevisiae, we compare our work with other approaches.
