Local Community Detection and Visualization: Experiment Based on Student Data

Social networks are ubiquitous in our daily life. Due to the rapid development of information and electronic technology, social networks are becoming more and more complex in terms of sizes and contents. It is of paramount significance to analyse the structures of social networks in order to unveil the myth beneath complex social networks. Network community detection is recognised as a fundamental tool towards social networks analytics. As a consequence, numerical community detection methods are proposed in the literature. For a real-world social network, an individual may possess multiple memberships, while the existing community detection methods are mainly designed for non-overlapping situations. With regard to this, this paper proposes a hybrid metaheuristic method to detect overlapping communities in social networks. In the proposed method, the overlapping community detection problem is formulated as an optimisation problem and a novel bat optimisation algorithm is designed to solve the established optimisation model. To enhance the searchability of the proposed algorithm, a local search operator based on tabu search is introduced. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm, experiments on benchmark and real-world social networks are carried out. The experiments indicate that the proposed algorithm is promising for overlapping community detection.

Individuals are often involved in multiple online social networks. Considering that owners of these networks are unwilling to share their networks, some global algorithms combine information from multiple networks to detect all communities in multiple networks without sharing their edges. When data owners are only interested in the community containing a given node, it is unnecessary and computationally expensive for multiple networks to interact with each other to mine all communities. Moreover, data owners who are specifically looking for a community typically prefer to provide less data than the global algorithms require. Therefore, we propose the Local Collaborative Community Detection problem (LCCD). It exploits information from multiple networks to jointly detect the local community containing a given node without directly sharing edges between networks. To address the LCCD problem, we present a method developed from M method, called colM, to detect the local community in multiple networks. This method adopts secure multiparty computation protocols to protect each network’s private information. Our experiments were conducted on real-world and synthetic datasets. Experimental results show that colM method could effectively identify community structures and outperform comparison algorithms.

Community detection is an effective approach to unveil relationships among individuals in online social networks. In the literature, quite a few algorithms have been proposed to conduct community detection by exploiting the topology of social networks and the attributes of social actors. In practice, community detection is usually conducted by third parties, such as advertisement companies and hospitals, with access to social networks for different purposes, which can easily lead to a privacy breach. In this paper, we investigate community detection in social networks aiming to protect the privacy of both the network topology and the users' attributes. We show that with additional prior knowledge, community detection can be performed by querying the information of only a fraction of instead of the entire population. In particular, we first propose a new scheme called differentially private community detection (DPCD). DPCD detects communities in social networks via a probabilistic generative model, which can be decomposed into subproblems solved by individual users. The private social relationships and attributes of each user are protected by objective perturbation with differential privacy guarantees. Then, we propose a parsimonious node affiliation recovery (NAR) algorithm, which is also differentially private, to unveil the community affiliation information of the whole population based on that of the limited number of queried individuals by solving a sparse optimization problem. Through both theoretical analysis and experimental validation using synthetic and real-world social networks, we demonstrate that the proposed DPCD scheme detects social communities under the modest privacy budget. In addition, we show the effectiveness of NAR to perform community detection by querying a limited number of individuals in social networks.

Local community detection algorithms are an important type of overlapping community detection methods. Local community detection methods identify local community structure through searching seeds and expansion process. In this paper, we propose a novel local community detection method on line graph through degree centrality and expansion (LCDDCE). We firstly employ line graph model to transfer edges into nodes of a new graph. Secondly, we evaluate edges relationship through a novel node similarity method on line graph. Thirdly, we introduce local community detection framework to identify local node community structure of line graph, combined with degree centrality and PageRank algorithm. Finally, we transfer them back into original graph. The experimental results on three classical benchmarks show that our LCDDCE method achieves a higher performance on normalized mutual information metric with other typical methods.

There have been more and more researches on community discovery in complex networks. Expanding of a source node into a community is one of the most successful methods for local community detection, especially when the global structure of the network is not accessible. In this paper, we propose CLOSE algorithm, Local Community Detection by LOcal Structure Expansion, based on the local expansion technique in the community detection. In CLOSE, we propose a novel connective function to identify a better source node. The node is in the center of a highly connected component of a graph. CLOSE selects a group of nodes instead of a single node to be the seed for the expansion of a local community. In addition, using the neighboring group can identify a suitable community for a hub node. Moreover, the expansion strategy is based on the label propagation technique instead of local community measurements. In experiments, we compare the performance of CLOSE with previous methods both on synthetic networks from the LFR Benchmark and real-world networks. We also examine the merit of the source node selection strategy. Both source node selection and community detection in CLOSE outperform previous algorithms.

Local community detection aims to obtain the local communities to which target nodes belong, by employing only partial information of the network. As a commonly used network model, bipartite applies naturally when modeling relations between two different classes of objects. There are three problems to be solved in local community detection, such as initial core node selection, expansion approach and community boundary criteria. In this work, a similarity based local community detection algorithm for bipartite networks (SLCDB) is proposed, and the algorithm can be used to detect local community structure by only using either type of nodes of a bipartite network. Experiments on real data prove that SLCDB algorithms output community structure can achieve a very high modularity which outperforms most existing local community detection methods for bipartite networks.

Recent years have witnessed the rapid growth of social network services. Real-world social networks are huge and changing over time. Consequently, the problems in this area have become more complex. Community detection is one of the most important problems in social networks. A good community can be defined as a group of nodes that are highly connected to each other and loosely connected to the nodes outside the community. Regarding the fact that social networks are huge in size, having complete information of the whole network is almost impossible. As a result, the problem of local community detection has become more popular in recent years. The problem of community detection in dynamic networks is well-investigated however, the local community detection is not widely addressed by researchers. In this paper, this problem is investigated by employing a number of existing local community detection algorithms in a dynamic structure. Results are reported in two different experiments. Experimental results show that one of the algorithms (algorithm P) outperforms other algorithms regarding the employed dynamic structure. The results indicate that algorithm P is much faster than other local community detection algorithms in dynamic networks.

A cascade information diffusion based label propagation algorithm for community detection in dynamic social networks

Detecting communities in complex networks and particularly in social networks have been gaining traction in recent years. Not much work has been undertaken in the area of Community Detection for patient-centric social networks. In this work, we have tried to detect significant communities in a patient-centric social network by computing similarity among the unstructured physician notes which are in the form of long texts. Experiments have been conducted using the MIMIC III dataset, which is a large open database containing de-identified health-related patient data. Three modularity based community detection algorithms, viz., FastGreedy, Walktrap, and Louvain have been applied to identify the potential communities in the network. Further, the significance of such communities has been tested using the Wilcoxon rank-total test. It is found that Louvain algorithm fared better in terms of modularity and significance compared to the other two algorithms.

Communities are inherent substructures present in social networks. Yet finding communities from a social network can be a difficult task. Therefore, finding communities from a social network is an interesting problem. Also, due to its use in many practical applications, it is considered to be an important problem in social network analysis and is well-studied. In this paper, we propose a maximum spanning tree based method to detect communities from a social network. Experimental results show that this method can detect communities with high accuracy and with reasonably good efficiency compared to other existing community detection techniques.KeywordsSocial NetworksCommunity DetectionMaximum Spanning Tree

Communities in social networks are groups of individuals who are connected with specific goals. Discovering information on the structure, members and types of changes of communities have always been of great interest. Despite the extensive global researches conducted on these, discovery has not been confirmed yet and researchers try to find methods and improve estimated techniques by using Data Mining tools, Graph Mining tools and artificial intelligence techniques. This paper proposes a novel two-phase approach based on global and local information to detect communities in social network. It explores the global information in the first phase and then exploits the local information in the second phase to discover communities more accurately. It also proposes a novel algorithm which exploits the local information and mines deeply for the second phase. Experimental results show that the proposed method has better performance and achieves more accurate results compared with the previous ones.

The main goal of recommendation systems is to offer items to a particular user based on some factors, such as users' interests and preferences, thus allowing for more efficient information access. This paper describes how Social Network Analysis and community detection method can be used to build a novel music recommendation approach. While most of the current recommendation systems consider users as the objects, which have only one key direction of interests, we focused on identifying the individual traits of a particular user.

The conventional notion of community that favors a high ratio of internal edges to outbound edges becomes invalid when each vertex participates in multiple communities. Such a behavior is commonplace in social networks. The significant overlaps among communities make most existing community detection algorithms ineffective. The lack of effective and efficient tools resulted in very few empirical studies on large-scale detection and analyses of overlapping community structure in real social networks. We developed recently a scalable and accurate method called the Partial Community Merger Algorithm (PCMA) with linear complexity and demonstrated its effectiveness by analyzing two online social networks, Sina Weibo and Friendster, with 79.4 and 65.6 million vertices, respectively. Here, we report in-depth analyses of the 2.9 million communities detected by PCMA to uncover their complex overlapping structure. Each community usually overlaps with a significant number of other communities and has far more outbound edges than internal edges. Yet, the communities remain well separated from each other. Most vertices in a community are multi-membership vertices, and they can be at the core or the peripheral. Almost half of the entire network can be accounted for by an extremely dense network of communities, with the communities being the vertices and the overlaps being the edges. The empirical findings ask for rethinking the notion of community, especially the boundary of a community. Realizing that it is how the edges are organized that matters, the f-core is suggested as a suitable concept for overlapping community in social networks. The results shed new light on the understanding of overlapping community.

The detection of communities in social networks is a task with multiple applications both in research and in sectors such as marketing and politics among others. In this paper, we address the task of detecting on-line communities of Twitter users for a given domain. Our main contribution consists in modelling the community detection problem as a biclustering task. We have performed the experimentation with data from the political domain, a very dynamic area with a large number of interested users and a high availability of tweets. We have evaluated our proposal using both extrinsic and intrinsic methods, reaching very good results in both cases. We use the silhouette coefficient as intrinsic metric for clustering evaluation, and a classification task of political leanings of Twitter users as extrinsic evaluation. One of the most interesting conclusions of our experiments is the quality, from the point of view of predictive capacity in the classification task, of the communities identified with the proposed method. The information provided by communities detected through “follow” relationships has a predictive capacity comparable to that of the contents of tweets written by users. The results also show how detected communities can give insights about future events related to these communities that arise around social networks.

The problem of community detection is relevant in many disciplines of science and modularity optimization is the widely accepted method for this purpose. It has recently been shown that this approach presents a resolution limit by which it is not possible to detect communities with sizes smaller than a threshold, which depends on the network size. Moreover, it might happen that the communities resulting from such an approach do not satisfy the usual qualitative definition of commune; i.e., nodes in a commune are more connected among themselves than to nodes outside the commune. In this paper we present a different method for community detection in complex networks. We define merit factors based on the weak and strong community definitions formulated by Radicchi [Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 101, 2658 (2004)] and we show that these local definitions avoid the resolution limit problem found in the modularity optimization approach.