159,064 research outputs found
Node-Centric Detection of Overlapping Communities in Social Networks
We present NECTAR, a community detection algorithm that generalizes Louvain
method's local search heuristic for overlapping community structures. NECTAR
chooses dynamically which objective function to optimize based on the network
on which it is invoked. Our experimental evaluation on both synthetic benchmark
graphs and real-world networks, based on ground-truth communities, shows that
NECTAR provides excellent results as compared with state of the art community
detection algorithms
Overlapping modularity at the critical point of k-clique percolation
One of the most remarkable social phenomena is the formation of communities
in social networks corresponding to families, friendship circles, work teams,
etc. Since people usually belong to several different communities at the same
time, the induced overlaps result in an extremely complicated web of the
communities themselves. Thus, uncovering the intricate community structure of
social networks is a non-trivial task with great potential for practical
applications, gaining a notable interest in the recent years. The Clique
Percolation Method (CPM) is one of the earliest overlapping community finding
methods, which was already used in the analysis of several different social
networks. In this approach the communities correspond to k-clique percolation
clusters, and the general heuristic for setting the parameters of the method is
to tune the system just below the critical point of k-clique percolation.
However, this rule is based on simple physical principles and its validity was
never subject to quantitative analysis. Here we examine the quality of the
partitioning in the vicinity of the critical point using recently introduced
overlapping modularity measures. According to our results on real social- and
other networks, the overlapping modularities show a maximum close to the
critical point, justifying the original criteria for the optimal parameter
settings.Comment: 20 pages, 6 figure
Identifying communities by influence dynamics in social networks
Communities are not static; they evolve, split and merge, appear and
disappear, i.e. they are product of dynamical processes that govern the
evolution of the network. A good algorithm for community detection should not
only quantify the topology of the network, but incorporate the dynamical
processes that take place on the network. We present a novel algorithm for
community detection that combines network structure with processes that support
creation and/or evolution of communities. The algorithm does not embrace the
universal approach but instead tries to focus on social networks and model
dynamic social interactions that occur on those networks. It identifies
leaders, and communities that form around those leaders. It naturally supports
overlapping communities by associating each node with a membership vector that
describes node's involvement in each community. This way, in addition to
overlapping communities, we can identify nodes that are good followers to their
leader, and also nodes with no clear community involvement that serve as a
proxy between several communities and are equally as important. We run the
algorithm for several real social networks which we believe represent a good
fraction of the wide body of social networks and discuss the results including
other possible applications.Comment: 10 pages, 6 figure
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