177,044 research outputs found
Social Network Analysis using Cultural Algorithms and its Variants
Finding relationships between social entities and discovering the underlying structures of networks are fundamental tasks for analyzing social networks. In recent years, various methods have been suggested to study these networks efficiently, however, due to the dynamic and complex nature that these networks have, a lot of open problems still exist in the field. The aim of this research is to propose an integrated computational model to study the structure and behavior of the complex social network. The focus of this research work is on two major classic problems in the field which are called community detection and link prediction. Moreover, a problem of population adaptation through knowledge migration in real-life social systems has been identified to model and study through the proposed method. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work in the field which is exploring this concept through this approach. In this research, a new adaptive knowledge-based evolutionary framework is defined to investigate the structure of social networks by adopting a multi-population cultural algorithm. The core of the model is designed based on a unique community-oriented approach to estimate the existence of a relationship between social entities in the network. In each evolutionary cycle, the normative knowledge is shaped through the extraction of the topological knowledge from the structure of the network. This source of knowledge is utilized for the various network analysis tasks such as estimating the quality of relation between social entities, related studies regarding the link prediction, population adaption, and knowledge formation. The main contributions of this work can be summarized in introducing a novel method to define, extract and represent different sources of knowledge from a snapshot of a given network to determine the range of the optimal solution, and building a probability matrix to show the quality of relations between pairs of actors in the system. Introducing a new similarity metric, utilizing the prior knowledge in dynamic social network analysis and study the co-evolution of societies in a case of individual migration are another major contributions of this work. According to the obtained results, utilizing the proposed approach in community detection problem can reduce the search space size by 80%. It also can improve the accuracy of the search process in high dense networks by up to 30% compared with the other well-known methods. Addressing the link prediction problem through the proposed approach also can reach the comparable results with other methods and predict the next state of the system with a notably high accuracy. In addition, the obtained results from the study of population adaption through knowledge migration indicate that population with prior knowledge about an environment can adapt themselves to the new environment faster than the ones who do not have this knowledge if the level of changes between the two environments is less than 25%. Therefore, utilizing this approach in dynamic social network analysis can reduce the search time and space significantly (up to above 90%), if the snapshots of the system are taken when the level of changes in the network structure is within 25%. In summary, the experimental results indicate that this knowledge-based approach is capable of exploring the evolution and structure of the network with the high level of accuracy while it improves the performance by reducing the search space and processing time
Community Detection via Maximization of Modularity and Its Variants
In this paper, we first discuss the definition of modularity (Q) used as a
metric for community quality and then we review the modularity maximization
approaches which were used for community detection in the last decade. Then, we
discuss two opposite yet coexisting problems of modularity optimization: in
some cases, it tends to favor small communities over large ones while in
others, large communities over small ones (so called the resolution limit
problem). Next, we overview several community quality metrics proposed to solve
the resolution limit problem and discuss Modularity Density (Qds) which
simultaneously avoids the two problems of modularity. Finally, we introduce two
novel fine-tuned community detection algorithms that iteratively attempt to
improve the community quality measurements by splitting and merging the given
network community structure. The first of them, referred to as Fine-tuned Q, is
based on modularity (Q) while the second one is based on Modularity Density
(Qds) and denoted as Fine-tuned Qds. Then, we compare the greedy algorithm of
modularity maximization (denoted as Greedy Q), Fine-tuned Q, and Fine-tuned Qds
on four real networks, and also on the classical clique network and the LFR
benchmark networks, each of which is instantiated by a wide range of
parameters. The results indicate that Fine-tuned Qds is the most effective
among the three algorithms discussed. Moreover, we show that Fine-tuned Qds can
be applied to the communities detected by other algorithms to significantly
improve their results
Network Community Detection on Metric Space
Community detection in a complex network is an important problem of much
interest in recent years. In general, a community detection algorithm chooses
an objective function and captures the communities of the network by optimizing
the objective function, and then, one uses various heuristics to solve the
optimization problem to extract the interesting communities for the user. In
this article, we demonstrate the procedure to transform a graph into points of
a metric space and develop the methods of community detection with the help of
a metric defined for a pair of points. We have also studied and analyzed the
community structure of the network therein. The results obtained with our
approach are very competitive with most of the well-known algorithms in the
literature, and this is justified over the large collection of datasets. On the
other hand, it can be observed that time taken by our algorithm is quite less
compared to other methods and justifies the theoretical findings
Extension of Modularity Density for Overlapping Community Structure
Modularity is widely used to effectively measure the strength of the disjoint
community structure found by community detection algorithms. Although several
overlapping extensions of modularity were proposed to measure the quality of
overlapping community structure, there is lack of systematic comparison of
different extensions. To fill this gap, we overview overlapping extensions of
modularity to select the best. In addition, we extend the Modularity Density
metric to enable its usage for overlapping communities. The experimental
results on four real networks using overlapping extensions of modularity,
overlapping modularity density, and six other community quality metrics show
that the best results are obtained when the product of the belonging
coefficients of two nodes is used as the belonging function. Moreover, our
experiments indicate that overlapping modularity density is a better measure of
the quality of overlapping community structure than other metrics considered.Comment: 8 pages in Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM),
2014 IEEE/ACM International Conference o
On the Permanence of Vertices in Network Communities
Despite the prevalence of community detection algorithms, relatively less
work has been done on understanding whether a network is indeed modular and how
resilient the community structure is under perturbations. To address this
issue, we propose a new vertex-based metric called "permanence", that can
quantitatively give an estimate of the community-like structure of the network.
The central idea of permanence is based on the observation that the strength
of membership of a vertex to a community depends upon the following two
factors: (i) the distribution of external connectivity of the vertex to
individual communities and not the total external connectivity, and (ii) the
strength of its internal connectivity and not just the total internal edges.
In this paper, we demonstrate that compared to other metrics, permanence
provides (i) a more accurate estimate of a derived community structure to the
ground-truth community and (ii) is more sensitive to perturbations in the
network. As a by-product of this study, we have also developed a community
detection algorithm based on maximizing permanence. For a modular network
structure, the results of our algorithm match well with ground-truth
communities.Comment: 10 pages, 5 figures, 8 tables, Accepted in 20th ACM SIGKDD Conference
on Knowledge Discovery and Data Minin
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