Influence of the Dynamic Social Network Timeframe Type and Size on the Group Evolution Discovery

New technologies allow to store vast amount of data about users interaction. From those data the social network can be created. Additionally, because usually also time and dates of this activities are stored, the dynamic of such network can be analysed by splitting it into many timeframes representing the state of the network during specific period of time. One of the most interesting issue is group evolution over time. To track group evolution the GED method can be used. However, choice of the timeframe type and length might have great influence on the method results. Therefore, in this paper, the influence of timeframe type as well as timeframe length on the GED method results is extensively analysed.Comment: The 2012 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining, IEEE Computer Society, 2012, pp. 678-68

Shortest Path Discovery in the Multi-layered Social Network

Multi-layered social networks consist of the fixed set of nodes linked by multiple connections. These connections may be derived from different types of user activities logged in the IT system. To calculate any structural measures for multi-layered networks this multitude of relations should be coped with in the parameterized way. Two separate algorithms for evaluation of shortest paths in the multi-layered social network are proposed in the paper. The first one is based on pre-processing - aggregation of multiple links into single multi-layered edges, whereas in the second approach, many edges are processed 'on the fly' in the middle of path discovery. Experimental studies carried out on the DBLP database converted into the multi-layered social network are presented as well.Comment: This is an extended version of the paper ASONAM 2011, IEEE Computer Society, pp. 497-501 DOI 10.1109/ASONAM.2011.6

Quantifying Social Network Dynamics

The dynamic character of most social networks requires to model evolution of networks in order to enable complex analysis of theirs dynamics. The following paper focuses on the definition of differences between network snapshots by means of Graph Differential Tuple. These differences enable to calculate the diverse distance measures as well as to investigate the speed of changes. Four separate measures are suggested in the paper with experimental study on real social network data.Comment: In proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Computational Aspects of Social Networks, CASoN 201

Do we really need to catch them all? A new User-guided Social Media Crawling method

With the growing use of popular social media services like Facebook and Twitter it is challenging to collect all content from the networks without access to the core infrastructure or paying for it. Thus, if all content cannot be collected one must consider which data are of most importance. In this work we present a novel User-guided Social Media Crawling method (USMC) that is able to collect data from social media, utilizing the wisdom of the crowd to decide the order in which user generated content should be collected to cover as many user interactions as possible. USMC is validated by crawling 160 public Facebook pages, containing content from 368 million users including 1.3 billion interactions, and it is compared with two other crawling methods. The results show that it is possible to cover approximately 75% of the interactions on a Facebook page by sampling just 20% of its posts, and at the same time reduce the crawling time by 53%. In addition, the social network constructed from the 20% sample contains more than 75% of the users and edges compared to the social network created from all posts, and it has similar degree distribution

Analysis of group evolution prediction in complex networks

In the world, in which acceptance and the identification with social communities are highly desired, the ability to predict evolution of groups over time appears to be a vital but very complex research problem. Therefore, we propose a new, adaptable, generic and mutli-stage method for Group Evolution Prediction (GEP) in complex networks, that facilitates reasoning about the future states of the recently discovered groups. The precise GEP modularity enabled us to carry out extensive and versatile empirical studies on many real-world complex / social networks to analyze the impact of numerous setups and parameters like time window type and size, group detection method, evolution chain length, prediction models, etc. Additionally, many new predictive features reflecting the group state at a given time have been identified and tested. Some other research problems like enriching learning evolution chains with external data have been analyzed as well