Evaluating Local Community Methods in Networks

We present a new benchmarking procedure that is unambiguous and specific to local community-finding methods, allowing one to compare the accuracy of various methods. We apply this to new and existing algorithms. A simple class of synthetic benchmark networks is also developed, capable of testing properties specific to these local methods.Comment: 8 pages, 9 figures, code included with sourc

A spatially aware method for mapping movement-based and place-based regions from spatial flow networks

This work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council and The Scottish Graduate School of Social Science.Community detection (CD) is a frequent method for analysing flow networks in geography. It allows us to partition the network into a set of densely interconnected regions, called communities. We introduce a new technique for including geographical weighting into existing methods for detecting spatially coherent communities. We take a link-based CD algorithm and adjust it to incorporate geographical weighting. We call this approach geographically weighted community detection (GWCD). Our method is demonstrated on two case studies of commonly encountered flow networks: commuter flows and taxi pick-up/drop-off flows. Further, we test different measures of distance for geographic weighting and compare our results with the unmodified CD algorithm. Our results show that GWCD can capture the geographical nature of flow regions, generating spatially smaller and more compact areas than if geography is omitted and that it can be used to distinguish between different types of movement-type communities.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Evolving Networks and Social Network Analysis Methods and Techniques

Evolving networks by definition are networks that change as a function of time. They are a natural extension of network science since almost all real-world networks evolve over time, either by adding or by removing nodes or links over time: elementary actor-level network measures like network centrality change as a function of time, popularity and influence of individuals grow or fade depending on processes, and events occur in networks during time intervals. Other problems such as network-level statistics computation, link prediction, community detection, and visualization gain additional research importance when applied to dynamic online social networks (OSNs). Due to their temporal dimension, rapid growth of users, velocity of changes in networks, and amount of data that these OSNs generate, effective and efficient methods and techniques for small static networks are now required to scale and deal with the temporal dimension in case of streaming settings. This chapter reviews the state of the art in selected aspects of evolving social networks presenting open research challenges related to OSNs. The challenges suggest that significant further research is required in evolving social networks, i.e., existent methods, techniques, and algorithms must be rethought and designed toward incremental and dynamic versions that allow the efficient analysis of evolving networks

Galaxy Zoo: Morphological Classification and Citizen Science

We provide a brief overview of the Galaxy Zoo and Zooniverse projects, including a short discussion of the history of, and motivation for, these projects as well as reviewing the science these innovative internet-based citizen science projects have produced so far. We briefly describe the method of applying en-masse human pattern recognition capabilities to complex data in data-intensive research. We also provide a discussion of the lessons learned from developing and running these community--based projects including thoughts on future applications of this methodology. This review is intended to give the reader a quick and simple introduction to the Zooniverse.Comment: 11 pages, 1 figure; to be published in Advances in Machine Learning and Data Mining for Astronom

Recent Advances in Social Data and Artificial Intelligence 2019

The importance and usefulness of subjects and topics involving social data and artificial intelligence are becoming widely recognized. This book contains invited review, expository, and original research articles dealing with, and presenting state-of-the-art accounts pf, the recent advances in the subjects of social data and artificial intelligence, and potentially their links to Cyberspace