A Method for Characterizing Communities in Dynamic Attributed Complex Networks

Many methods have been proposed to detect communities, not only in plain, but also in attributed, directed or even dynamic complex networks. In its simplest form, a community structure takes the form of a partition of the node set. From the modeling point of view, to be of some utility, this partition must then be characterized relatively to the properties of the studied system. However, if most of the existing works focus on defining methods for the detection of communities, only very few try to tackle this interpretation problem. Moreover, the existing approaches are limited either in the type of data they handle, or by the nature of the results they output. In this work, we propose a method to efficiently support such a characterization task. We first define a sequence-based representation of networks, combining temporal information, topological measures, and nodal attributes. We then describe how to identify the most emerging sequential patterns of this dataset, and use them to characterize the communities. We also show how to detect unusual behavior in a community, and highlight outliers. Finally, as an illustration, we apply our method to a network of scientific collaborations.Comment: IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Network Analysis and Mining (ASONAM), P\'ekin : China (2014

What did I do Wrong in my MOBA Game?: Mining Patterns Discriminating Deviant Behaviours

International audienceThe success of electronic sports (eSports), where professional gamers participate in competitive leagues and tournaments , brings new challenges for the video game industry. Other than fun, games must be difficult and challenging for eSports professionals but still easy and enjoyable for amateurs. In this article, we consider Multi-player Online Battle Arena games (MOBA) and particularly, " Defense of the Ancients 2 " , commonly known simply as DOTA2. In this context, a challenge is to propose data analysis methods and metrics that help players to improve their skills. We design a data mining-based method that discovers strategic patterns from historical behavioral traces: Given a model encoding an expected way of playing (the norm), we are interested in patterns deviating from the norm that may explain a game outcome from which player can learn more efficient ways of playing. The method is formally introduced and shown to be adaptable to different scenarios. Finally, we provide an experimental evaluation over a dataset of 10, 000 behavioral game traces

Partial orders and logical concept analysis to explore patterns extracted by data mining

International audienceData mining techniques are used in order to discover emerging knowledge (patterns) in databases. The problem of such techniques is that there are, in general, too many resulting patterns for a user to explore them all by hand. Some methods try to reduce the number of patterns without a priori pruning. The number of patterns remains, nevertheless, high. Other approaches, based on a total ranking, propose to show to the user the top-k patterns with respect to a measure. Those methods do not take into account the user's knowledge and the dependencies that exist between patterns. In this paper, we propose a new way for the user to explore extracted patterns. The method is based on navigation in a partial order over the set of all patterns in the Logical Concept Analysis framework. It accommodates several kinds of patterns and the dependencies between patterns are taken into account thanks to partial orders. It allows the user to use his/her background knowledge to navigate through the partial order, without a priori pruning. We illustrate how our method can be applied on two different tasks (software engineering and natural language processing) and two different kinds of patterns (association rules and sequential patterns)

A Pattern Mining Approach to Study Strategy Balance in RTS Games

International audienceWhereas purest strategic games such as Go and Chess seem timeless, the lifetime of a video game is short, influenced by popular culture, trends, boredom and technological innovations. Even the important budget and de- velopments allocated by editors cannot guarantee a timeless success. Instead, novelties and corrections are proposed to extend an inevitably bounded lifetime. Novelties can unexpectedly break the balance of a game, as players can discover unbalanced strategies that developers did not take into account. In the new context of electronic sports, an important challenge is to be able to detect game balance issues. In this article, we consider real time strategy games (RTS) and present an efficient pattern mining algorithm as a basic tool for game balance designers that enables one to search for unbalanced strategies in historical data through a Knowledge Discovery in Databases process (KDD). We experiment with our algorithm on StarCraft II historical data, played professionally as an electronic sport

Condensed Representation of Sequential Patterns according to Frequency-based Measures

International audienceCondensed representations of patterns are at the core of many data mining works and there are a lot of contributions handling data described by items. In this paper, we tackle sequential data and we define an exact condensed representation for sequential patterns according to the frequency-based measures. These measures are often used, typically in order to evaluate classification rules. Furthermore, we show how to infer the best patterns according to these measures, i.e., the patterns which maximize them. These patterns are immediately obtained from the condensed representation so that this approach is easily usable in practice. Experiments conducted on various datasets demonstrate the feasibility and the interest of our approach