  Community detection is one of the fundamental problems of network analysis,
for which a number of methods have been proposed. Most model-based or
criteria-based methods have to solve an optimization problem over a discrete
set of labels to find communities, which is computationally infeasible. Some
fast spectral algorithms have been proposed for specific methods or models, but
only on a case-by-case basis. Here we propose a general approach for maximizing
a function of a network adjacency matrix over discrete labels by projecting the
set of labels onto a subspace approximating the leading eigenvectors of the
expected adjacency matrix. This projection onto a low-dimensional space makes
the feasible set of labels much smaller and the optimization problem much
easier. We prove a general result about this method and show how to apply it to
several previously proposed community detection criteria, establishing its
consistency for label estimation in each case and demonstrating the fundamental
connection between spectral properties of the network and various model-based
approaches to community detection. Simulations and applications to real-world
data are included to demonstrate our method performs well for multiple problems
over a wide range of parameters.
