Dynamic communities and their detection

Overlapping community detection has already become an interesting problem in data mining and also a useful technique in applications. This underlines the importance of following the lifetime of communities in real graphs. Palla et al. developed a promising method, and analyzed community evolution on two large databases [23]. We have followed their footsteps in analyzing large real-world databases and found, that the framework they use to describe the dynamics of communities is insufficient for our data. The method used by Palla et al. is also dependent on a very special community detection algorithm, the clique percolation method, and on its monotonic nature. In this paper we propose an extension of the basic community events described in [23] and a method capable of handling communities found a non-monotonic community detection algorithm. We also report on findings that came from the tests on real social graphs

Brands, networks, communities: How brand names are wired in the mind

Brands can be defined as psychological constructs residing in our minds. By analyzing brand associations, we can study the mental constructs around them. In this paper, we study brands as parts of an associative network based on a word association database. We explore the communities–closely-knit groups in the mind–around brand names in this structure using two community detection algorithms in the Hungarian word association database ConnectYourMind. We identify brand names inside the communities of a word association network and explain why these brand names are part of the community. Several detected communities contain brand names from the same product category, and the words in these categories were connected either to brands in the category or to words describing the product category. Based on our findings, we describe the mental position of brand names. We show that brand knowledge, product knowledge and real word knowledge interact with each other. We also show how the meaning of a product category arises and how this meaning is related to brand meaning. Our results suggest that words sharing the same community with brand names can be used in brand communication and brand positioning