231,496 research outputs found
Benchmark model to assess community structure in evolving networks
Detecting the time evolution of the community structure of networks is
crucial to identify major changes in the internal organization of many complex
systems, which may undergo important endogenous or exogenous events. This
analysis can be done in two ways: considering each snapshot as an independent
community detection problem or taking into account the whole evolution of the
network. In the first case, one can apply static methods on the temporal
snapshots, which correspond to configurations of the system in short time
windows, and match afterwards the communities across layers. Alternatively, one
can develop dedicated dynamic procedures, so that multiple snapshots are
simultaneously taken into account while detecting communities, which allows us
to keep memory of the flow. To check how well a method of any kind could
capture the evolution of communities, suitable benchmarks are needed. Here we
propose a model for generating simple dynamic benchmark graphs, based on
stochastic block models. In them, the time evolution consists of a periodic
oscillation of the system's structure between configurations with built-in
community structure. We also propose the extension of quality comparison
indices to the dynamic scenario.Comment: 11 pages, 7 figures, 3 table
Detecting Community Structure in Dynamic Social Networks Using the Concept of Leadership
Detecting community structure in social networks is a fundamental problem
empowering us to identify groups of actors with similar interests. There have
been extensive works focusing on finding communities in static networks,
however, in reality, due to dynamic nature of social networks, they are
evolving continuously. Ignoring the dynamic aspect of social networks, neither
allows us to capture evolutionary behavior of the network nor to predict the
future status of individuals. Aside from being dynamic, another significant
characteristic of real-world social networks is the presence of leaders, i.e.
nodes with high degree centrality having a high attraction to absorb other
members and hence to form a local community. In this paper, we devised an
efficient method to incrementally detect communities in highly dynamic social
networks using the intuitive idea of importance and persistence of community
leaders over time. Our proposed method is able to find new communities based on
the previous structure of the network without recomputing them from scratch.
This unique feature, enables us to efficiently detect and track communities
over time rapidly. Experimental results on the synthetic and real-world social
networks demonstrate that our method is both effective and efficient in
discovering communities in dynamic social networks
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
Analysis of group evolution prediction in complex networks
In the world, in which acceptance and the identification with social
communities are highly desired, the ability to predict evolution of groups over
time appears to be a vital but very complex research problem. Therefore, we
propose a new, adaptable, generic and mutli-stage method for Group Evolution
Prediction (GEP) in complex networks, that facilitates reasoning about the
future states of the recently discovered groups. The precise GEP modularity
enabled us to carry out extensive and versatile empirical studies on many
real-world complex / social networks to analyze the impact of numerous setups
and parameters like time window type and size, group detection method,
evolution chain length, prediction models, etc. Additionally, many new
predictive features reflecting the group state at a given time have been
identified and tested. Some other research problems like enriching learning
evolution chains with external data have been analyzed as well
Community Detection in Dynamic Networks via Adaptive Label Propagation
An adaptive label propagation algorithm (ALPA) is proposed to detect and
monitor communities in dynamic networks. Unlike the traditional methods by
re-computing the whole community decomposition after each modification of the
network, ALPA takes into account the information of historical communities and
updates its solution according to the network modifications via a local label
propagation process, which generally affects only a small portion of the
network. This makes it respond to network changes at low computational cost.
The effectiveness of ALPA has been tested on both synthetic and real-world
networks, which shows that it can successfully identify and track dynamic
communities. Moreover, ALPA could detect communities with high quality and
accuracy compared to other methods. Therefore, being low-complexity and
parameter-free, ALPA is a scalable and promising solution for some real-world
applications of community detection in dynamic networks.Comment: 16 pages, 11 figure
Graphical Analysis of Social Group Dynamics
Identifying communities in social networks becomes an increasingly important
research problem. Several methods for identifying such groups have been
developed, however, qualitative analysis (taking into account the scale of the
problem) still poses serious problems. This paper describes a tool for
facilitating such an analysis, allowing to visualize the dynamics and
supporting localization of different events (such as creation or merging of
groups). In the final part of the paper, the experimental results performed
using the benchmark data (Enron emails) provide an insight into usefulness of
the proposed tool.Comment: Fourth International Conference on Computational Aspects of Social
Networks, CASoN 2012, Sao Carlos, Brazil, November 21-23, 2012, pp. 41-46;
IEEE Computer Society, 201
Exploring the Evolution of Node Neighborhoods in Dynamic Networks
Dynamic Networks are a popular way of modeling and studying the behavior of
evolving systems. However, their analysis constitutes a relatively recent
subfield of Network Science, and the number of available tools is consequently
much smaller than for static networks. In this work, we propose a method
specifically designed to take advantage of the longitudinal nature of dynamic
networks. It characterizes each individual node by studying the evolution of
its direct neighborhood, based on the assumption that the way this neighborhood
changes reflects the role and position of the node in the whole network. For
this purpose, we define the concept of \textit{neighborhood event}, which
corresponds to the various transformations such groups of nodes can undergo,
and describe an algorithm for detecting such events. We demonstrate the
interest of our method on three real-world networks: DBLP, LastFM and Enron. We
apply frequent pattern mining to extract meaningful information from temporal
sequences of neighborhood events. This results in the identification of
behavioral trends emerging in the whole network, as well as the individual
characterization of specific nodes. We also perform a cluster analysis, which
reveals that, in all three networks, one can distinguish two types of nodes
exhibiting different behaviors: a very small group of active nodes, whose
neighborhood undergo diverse and frequent events, and a very large group of
stable nodes
An Ensemble Framework for Detecting Community Changes in Dynamic Networks
Dynamic networks, especially those representing social networks, undergo
constant evolution of their community structure over time. Nodes can migrate
between different communities, communities can split into multiple new
communities, communities can merge together, etc. In order to represent dynamic
networks with evolving communities it is essential to use a dynamic model
rather than a static one. Here we use a dynamic stochastic block model where
the underlying block model is different at different times. In order to
represent the structural changes expressed by this dynamic model the network
will be split into discrete time segments and a clustering algorithm will
assign block memberships for each segment. In this paper we show that using an
ensemble of clustering assignments accommodates for the variance in scalable
clustering algorithms and produces superior results in terms of
pairwise-precision and pairwise-recall. We also demonstrate that the dynamic
clustering produced by the ensemble can be visualized as a flowchart which
encapsulates the community evolution succinctly.Comment: 6 pages, under submission to HPEC Graph Challeng
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