40,645 research outputs found
Location Prediction: Communities Speak Louder than Friends
Humans are social animals, they interact with different communities of
friends to conduct different activities. The literature shows that human
mobility is constrained by their social relations. In this paper, we
investigate the social impact of a person's communities on his mobility,
instead of all friends from his online social networks. This study can be
particularly useful, as certain social behaviors are influenced by specific
communities but not all friends. To achieve our goal, we first develop a
measure to characterize a person's social diversity, which we term `community
entropy'. Through analysis of two real-life datasets, we demonstrate that a
person's mobility is influenced only by a small fraction of his communities and
the influence depends on the social contexts of the communities. We then
exploit machine learning techniques to predict users' future movement based on
their communities' information. Extensive experiments demonstrate the
prediction's effectiveness.Comment: ACM Conference on Online Social Networks 2015, COSN 201
Fast Shortest Path Distance Estimation in Large Networks
We study the problem of preprocessing a large graph so that point-to-point shortest-path queries can be answered very fast. Computing shortest paths is a well studied problem, but exact algorithms do not scale to huge graphs encountered on the web, social networks, and other applications.
In this paper we focus on approximate methods for distance estimation, in particular using landmark-based distance indexing. This approach involves selecting a subset of nodes as landmarks and computing (offline) the distances from each node in the graph to those landmarks. At runtime, when the distance between a pair of nodes is needed, we can estimate it quickly by combining the precomputed distances of the two nodes to the landmarks.
We prove that selecting the optimal set of landmarks is an NP-hard problem, and thus heuristic solutions need to be employed. Given a budget of memory for the index, which translates directly into a budget of landmarks, different landmark selection strategies can yield dramatically different results in terms of accuracy. A number of simple methods that scale well to large graphs are therefore developed and experimentally compared. The simplest methods choose central nodes of the graph, while the more elaborate ones select central nodes that are also far away from one another. The efficiency of the suggested techniques is tested experimentally using five different real world graphs with millions of edges; for a given accuracy, they require as much as 250 times less space than the current approach in the literature which considers selecting landmarks at random.
Finally, we study applications of our method in two problems arising naturally in large-scale networks, namely, social search and community detection.Yahoo! Research (internship
Community Detection from Location-Tagged Networks
Many real world systems or web services can be represented as a network such
as social networks and transportation networks. In the past decade, many
algorithms have been developed to detect the communities in a network using
connections between nodes. However in many real world networks, the locations
of nodes have great influence on the community structure. For example, in a
social network, more connections are established between geographically
proximate users. The impact of locations on community has not been fully
investigated by the research literature. In this paper, we propose a community
detection method which takes locations of nodes into consideration. The goal is
to detect communities with both geographic proximity and network closeness. We
analyze the distribution of the distances between connected and unconnected
nodes to measure the influence of location on the network structure on two real
location-tagged social networks. We propose a method to determine if a
location-based community detection method is suitable for a given network. We
propose a new community detection algorithm that pushes the location
information into the community detection. We test our proposed method on both
synthetic data and real world network datasets. The results show that the
communities detected by our method distribute in a smaller area compared with
the traditional methods and have the similar or higher tightness on network
connections
Semi-Supervised Overlapping Community Finding based on Label Propagation with Pairwise Constraints
Algorithms for detecting communities in complex networks are generally
unsupervised, relying solely on the structure of the network. However, these
methods can often fail to uncover meaningful groupings that reflect the
underlying communities in the data, particularly when those structures are
highly overlapping. One way to improve the usefulness of these algorithms is by
incorporating additional background information, which can be used as a source
of constraints to direct the community detection process. In this work, we
explore the potential of semi-supervised strategies to improve algorithms for
finding overlapping communities in networks. Specifically, we propose a new
method, based on label propagation, for finding communities using a limited
number of pairwise constraints. Evaluations on synthetic and real-world
datasets demonstrate the potential of this approach for uncovering meaningful
community structures in cases where each node can potentially belong to more
than one community.Comment: Fix table
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