55,824 research outputs found
Clustering and Community Detection in Directed Networks: A Survey
Networks (or graphs) appear as dominant structures in diverse domains,
including sociology, biology, neuroscience and computer science. In most of the
aforementioned cases graphs are directed - in the sense that there is
directionality on the edges, making the semantics of the edges non symmetric.
An interesting feature that real networks present is the clustering or
community structure property, under which the graph topology is organized into
modules commonly called communities or clusters. The essence here is that nodes
of the same community are highly similar while on the contrary, nodes across
communities present low similarity. Revealing the underlying community
structure of directed complex networks has become a crucial and
interdisciplinary topic with a plethora of applications. Therefore, naturally
there is a recent wealth of research production in the area of mining directed
graphs - with clustering being the primary method and tool for community
detection and evaluation. The goal of this paper is to offer an in-depth review
of the methods presented so far for clustering directed networks along with the
relevant necessary methodological background and also related applications. The
survey commences by offering a concise review of the fundamental concepts and
methodological base on which graph clustering algorithms capitalize on. Then we
present the relevant work along two orthogonal classifications. The first one
is mostly concerned with the methodological principles of the clustering
algorithms, while the second one approaches the methods from the viewpoint
regarding the properties of a good cluster in a directed network. Further, we
present methods and metrics for evaluating graph clustering results,
demonstrate interesting application domains and provide promising future
research directions.Comment: 86 pages, 17 figures. Physics Reports Journal (To Appear
Community Structure Characterization
This entry discusses the problem of describing some communities identified in
a complex network of interest, in a way allowing to interpret them. We suppose
the community structure has already been detected through one of the many
methods proposed in the literature. The question is then to know how to extract
valuable information from this first result, in order to allow human
interpretation. This requires subsequent processing, which we describe in the
rest of this entry
Solutions to Detect and Analyze Online Radicalization : A Survey
Online Radicalization (also called Cyber-Terrorism or Extremism or
Cyber-Racism or Cyber- Hate) is widespread and has become a major and growing
concern to the society, governments and law enforcement agencies around the
world. Research shows that various platforms on the Internet (low barrier to
publish content, allows anonymity, provides exposure to millions of users and a
potential of a very quick and widespread diffusion of message) such as YouTube
(a popular video sharing website), Twitter (an online micro-blogging service),
Facebook (a popular social networking website), online discussion forums and
blogosphere are being misused for malicious intent. Such platforms are being
used to form hate groups, racist communities, spread extremist agenda, incite
anger or violence, promote radicalization, recruit members and create virtual
organi- zations and communities. Automatic detection of online radicalization
is a technically challenging problem because of the vast amount of the data,
unstructured and noisy user-generated content, dynamically changing content and
adversary behavior. There are several solutions proposed in the literature
aiming to combat and counter cyber-hate and cyber-extremism. In this survey, we
review solutions to detect and analyze online radicalization. We review 40
papers published at 12 venues from June 2003 to November 2011. We present a
novel classification scheme to classify these papers. We analyze these
techniques, perform trend analysis, discuss limitations of existing techniques
and find out research gaps
Extraction and Analysis of Facebook Friendship Relations
Online Social Networks (OSNs) are a unique Web and social phenomenon, affecting tastes and behaviors of their users and helping them to maintain/create friendships. It is interesting to analyze the growth and evolution of Online Social Networks both from the point of view of marketing and other of new services and from a scientific viewpoint, since their structure and evolution may share similarities with real-life social networks. In social sciences, several techniques for analyzing (online) social networks have been developed, to evaluate quantitative properties (e.g., defining metrics and measures of structural characteristics of the networks) or qualitative aspects (e.g., studying the attachment model for the network evolution, the binary trust relationships, and the link prediction problem).\ud
However, OSN analysis poses novel challenges both to Computer and Social scientists. We present our long-term research effort in analyzing Facebook, the largest and arguably most successful OSN today: it gathers more than 500 million users. Access to data about Facebook users and their friendship relations, is restricted; thus, we acquired the necessary information directly from the front-end of the Web site, in order to reconstruct a sub-graph representing anonymous interconnections among a significant subset of users. We describe our ad-hoc, privacy-compliant crawler for Facebook data extraction. To minimize bias, we adopt two different graph mining techniques: breadth-first search (BFS) and rejection sampling. To analyze the structural properties of samples consisting of millions of nodes, we developed a specific tool for analyzing quantitative and qualitative properties of social networks, adopting and improving existing Social Network Analysis (SNA) techniques and algorithms
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