Multiplex graphs have been recently proposed as a model to represent high-level complexity in real-world networks such as heterogeneous social networks where actors could be characterized by heterogeneous properties and could be linked with different types of social interactions. This has brought new challenges in community detection, which aims to identify pertinent groups of nodes in a complex graph. In this context, great efforts have been made to tackle the problem of community detection in multiplex graphs. However, most of the proposed methods until recently deal with static multiplex graph and ignore the temporal dimension, which is a key characteristic of real networks. Even more, the few methods that consider temporal graphs, they just propose to follow communities over time and none of them use the temporal aspect directly to detect stable communities, which are often more meaningful in reality. Thus, this paper proposes a new two-step method to detect stable communities in temporal multiplex graphs. The first step aims to find the best static graph partition at each instant by applying a new hybrid community detection algorithm, which considers both relations heterogeneities and nodes similarities. Then, the second step considers the temporal dimension in order to find final stable communities. Finally, experiments on synthetic graphs and a real social network show that this method is competitive and it is able to extract high-quality communities.
Abstract. With the growing number of users and the huge amount of information in dynamic social networks, contextualizing community detection has been a challenging task. Thus, modeling these social networks is a key issue for the process of contextualized community detection. In this work, we propose a temporal multiplex information graphbased model to represent dynamic social networks: we consider simultaneously the social network dynamicity, its structure (different social connections) and various members' profiles so as to calculate similarities between "nodes" in each specific context. Finally a comparative study on a real social network shows the efficiency of our approach and illustrates practical uses.
Learners' community choice has a crucial role in e‐learning effectiveness. Indeed, individual and structural factors (i.e., learners pre‐existing profiles and networks of interactions) significantly affect how learners develop a collaborative e‐learning environment. In this context, social network analysis, singularly community detection has been a good approach to improve collaborative environment through discovering pertinent learners' communities and new effective relations. However, with social media emergence, many real‐world networks, such as learners' networks, evolve the connections in multiple layers, where each layer represents a different type of relationship. This, combined with their continuous evolution over time, has brought new challenges to the field of community detection. Thus, this paper proposes a new configurable algorithm for detecting collaborative and lifelong communities within dynamic multirelational social learners' networks. To do so, this algorithm is based on a graph model to represent these different interactions as well as different learners' profiles and characteristics. Moreover, by using particle swarm optimization, it aims to optimize a configurable combined metric to detect the most relevant community appropriate to a given situation. Finally, it considers the temporal dimension to find the final lifelong community. By the end of this paper, experimental results using synthetic networks prove that the proposed algorithm achieves better results compared with other community detection algorithms. Therewith, experiments on a real e‐learning network show this algorithm's role in improving collaboration within learners' network.
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