A Combination Approach to Community Detection in Social Networks by Utilizing Structural and Attribute Data

Abstract

Community detection is one of the important tasks of social network analysis. It has significant practical importance for achieving cost-effective solutions for problems in the area of search engine optimization, spam detection, viral marketing, counter-terrorism, epidemic modeling, etc. In recent years, there has been an exponential growth of online social platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Pinterest and Tumblr, as people can easily connect to each other in the Internet era overcoming geographical barriers. This has brought about new forms of social interaction, dialogue, exchange and collaboration across diverse social networks of unprecedented scales. At the same time, it presents new challenges and demands more effective, as well as scalable, graphmining techniques because the extraction of novel and useful knowledge from massive amount of graph data holds the key to the analysis of social networks in a much larger scale. In this research paper, the problem to find communities within social networks is considered. Existing community detection techniques utilize the topological structure of the social network, but a proper combination of the available attribute data, which represents the properties of the participants or actors, and the structure data of the social network graph is promising for the detection of more accurate and meaningful communities.

Community Detection in Attributed Social Networks: A Unified Weight-Based Model and Its Regimes

“…First of all, it may be used for search engine optimization and spam detection [149,172]. Furthermore, community detection methods may help in counter-terrorist activities and disclosing fraudulent schemes [149]. There also exist applications related to the analysis of networks of different nature: protein-protein interactions, genes, epidemics and other biological networks [149].…”

“…Community detection in node-attributed networks has not only obvious applications in marketing (recommender systems, targeted advertisements and user profiling) [8], but also can effectively support other multiple advanced applications. First of all, it may be used for search engine optimization and spam detection [149,172]. Furthermore, community detection methods may help in counter-terrorist activities and disclosing fraudulent schemes [149].…”