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

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

Using Machine Learning to Predict the Evolution of Physics Research

The advancement of science as outlined by Popper and Kuhn is largely qualitative, but with bibliometric data it is possible and desirable to develop a quantitative picture of scientific progress. Furthermore it is also important to allocate finite resources to research topics that have growth potential, to accelerate the process from scientific breakthroughs to technological innovations. In this paper, we address this problem of quantitative knowledge evolution by analysing the APS publication data set from 1981 to 2010. We build the bibliographic coupling and co-citation networks, use the Louvain method to detect topical clusters (TCs) in each year, measure the similarity of TCs in consecutive years, and visualize the results as alluvial diagrams. Having the predictive features describing a given TC and its known evolution in the next year, we can train a machine learning model to predict future changes of TCs, i.e., their continuing, dissolving, merging and splitting. We found the number of papers from certain journals, the degree, closeness, and betweenness to be the most predictive features. Additionally, betweenness increases significantly for merging events, and decreases significantly for splitting events. Our results represent a first step from a descriptive understanding of the Science of Science (SciSci), towards one that is ultimately prescriptive.Comment: 24 pages, 10 figures, 4 tables, supplementary information is include

Evaluation of TRANSFoRm Mobile eHealth Solution for Remote Patient Monitoring during Clinical Trials

Today, in the digital age, the mobile devices are more and more used to aid people in the struggle to improve or maintain their health. In this paper, the mobile eHealth solution for remote patient monitoring during clinical trials is presented, together with the outcomes of quantitative and qualitative performance evaluation. The evaluation is a third step to improve the quality of the application after earlier Good Clinical Practice certification and validation with the participation of 10 patients and three general practitioners. This time, the focus was on the usability which was evaluated by the seventeen participants divided into three age groups (18-28, 29-50, and 50+). The results, from recorded sessions and the eye tracking, show that there is no difference in performance between the first group and the second group, while for the third group the performance was worse, however, it was still good enough to complete task within reasonable time.Comment: 16 pages, 8 Figures, Results of EU FP7 TRANSFoRm projec

Identification of Group Changes in Blogosphere

The paper addresses a problem of change identification in social group evolution. A new SGCI method for discovering of stable groups was proposed and compared with existing GED method. The experimental studies on a Polish blogosphere service revealed that both methods are able to identify similar evolution events even though both use different concepts. Some differences were demonstrated as wellComment: The 2012 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining, IEEE Computer Society, 2012, pp. 1233-123

Predicting Community Evolution in Social Networks

Nowadays, sustained development of different social media can be observed worldwide. One of the relevant research domains intensively explored recently is analysis of social communities existing in social media as well as prediction of their future evolution taking into account collected historical evolution chains. These evolution chains proposed in the paper contain group states in the previous time frames and its historical transitions that were identified using one out of two methods: Stable Group Changes Identification (SGCI) and Group Evolution Discovery (GED). Based on the observed evolution chains of various length, structural network features are extracted, validated and selected as well as used to learn classification models. The experimental studies were performed on three real datasets with different profile: DBLP, Facebook and Polish blogosphere. The process of group prediction was analysed with respect to different classifiers as well as various descriptive feature sets extracted from evolution chains of different length. The results revealed that, in general, the longer evolution chains the better predictive abilities of the classification models. However, chains of length 3 to 7 enabled the GED-based method to almost reach its maximum possible prediction quality. For SGCI, this value was at the level of 3 to 5 last periods.Comment: Entropy 2015, 17, 1-x manuscripts; doi:10.3390/e170x000x 46 page