Deriving network modularity

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My question is exactly what was asked here:

Specifically:

Given [this definition of $Q$] we proceed by writing $s$ as a linear combination of the normalised eigenvectors $u_i$ of $B$ so that $s = \sum_{i=1}^{n} a_i u_i$ with $a_i = u_i^T\cdot s$.

It's not clear to my why the membership vector $s$ (which can contain only 1 and -1) can be written like this.

The poster never came back to write up the solution, and I do not have the 50 reputation required to comment on Math Overflow, so I can't ask them for the solution.

The paper in question can be found here

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This is a linear algebra thing. The matrix B (called the modularity matrix in the paper of interest from the linked question) is real symmetric, and a property of real symmetric matrices is that their eigenvectors form an orthonormal basis. The formula you ask about is just decomposing $s $ as a linear combination of these eigen-basis vectors.