Many methods have been proposed to detect communities, not only in plain, but also in attributed, di- rected, or even dynamic complex networks. From the modeling point of view, to be of some utility, the com- munity structure must be characterized relatively to the properties of the studied system. However, most of the existing works focus on the detection of communities, and only very few try to tackle this interpretation problem. Moreover, the existing approaches are limited either by the type of data they handle or by the nature of the results they output. In this work, we see the interpretation of commu- nities as a problem independent from the detection process, consisting in identifying the most characteristic features of communities. We give a formal definition of this problem and propose a method to solve it. To this aim, we first define a sequence-based representation of networks, com- bining temporal information, community structure, topo- logical measures, and nodal attributes. We then describe how to identify the most emerging sequential patterns of this dataset and use them to characterize the communities. We study the performance of our method on artificially generated dynamic attributed networks. We also em- pirically validate our framework on real-world systems: a DBLP network of scientific collaborations, and a LastFM network of social and musical interactions.
Another method was recently defined based on frequent pattern mining, which can be used for community interpretation. In @cite_38 , Stattner & Collard introduced the notion of . A conceptual link corresponds to a set of links from the original network, connecting nodes who share similar attributes. Such a link is said to be frequent when the number of links it represents is above a given threshold. This method can be seen as a generalization of the notion of homophily, and was initially used to simplify the network and help understanding it. Finding frequent conceptual links amounts to detecting groups of nodes sharing common attributes, with a pattern mining point of view. This methods considers both the network structure and the nodal attributes, however it ignores their evolution, i.e. it does not take the temporal aspect into account.
@cite_38
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In this work, we propose a novel approach for the discovery of frequent patterns in a social network on the basis of both vertex attributes and link frequency. With an analogy to the traditional task of mining frequent item sets, we show that the issue addressed can be formulated in terms of a conceptual analysis that elicits conceptual links. A social-based conceptual link is a synthetic representation of a set of links between groups of vertexes that share similar internal properties. We propose a first algorithm that optimizes the search into the concept lattice of conceptual links and extracts maximal frequent conceptual links. We study the performances of our solution and give experimental results obtained on a sample example. Finally we show that the set of conceptual links extracted provides a conceptual view of the social network. Network theory has established itself as an appropriate tool for complex systems analysis and pattern recognition. In the context of spatiotemporal data analysis, correlation networks are used in the vast majority of works. However, the Pearson correlation coefficient captures only linear relationships and does not correctly capture recurrent events. This missed information is essential for temporal pattern recognition. In this work, we propose a chronological network construction process that is capable of capturing various events. Similar to the previous methods, we divide the area of study into grid cells and represent them by nodes. In our approach, links are established if two consecutive events occur in two different nodes. Our method is computationally efficient, adaptable to different time windows and can be applied to any spatiotemporal data set. As a proof-of-concept, we evaluated the proposed approach by constructing chronological networks from the MODIS dataset for fire events in the Amazon basin. We explore two data analytic approaches: one static and another temporal. The results show some activity patterns on the fire events and a displacement phenomenon over the year. The validity of the analyses in this application indicates that our data modeling approach is very promising for spatio-temporal data mining. Most previously proposed frequent graph mining algorithms are intended to find the complete set of all frequent, closed subgraphs. However, in many cases only a subset of the frequent subgraphs with a certain topology is of special interest. Thus, the method of mining the complete set of all frequent subgraphs is not suitable for mining these frequent subgraphs of special interest as it wastes considerable computing power and space on uninteresting subgraphs. In this paper we develop a new algorithm, CLAN, to mine the frequent closed cliques, the most coherent structures in the graph setting. By exploring some properties of the clique pattern, we can simplify the canonical label design and the corresponding clique (or subclique) isomorphism testing. Several effective pruning methods are proposed to prune the search space, while the clique closure checking scheme is used to remove the non-closed clique patterns. Our empirical results show that CLAN is very efficient for large dense graph databases with which the traditional graph mining algorithms fail. The novelty of our method is further demonstrated by the application of CLAN in mining highly correlated stocks from large stock market data. A common data mining task on networks is community detection, which seeks an unsupervised decomposition of a network into structural groups based on statistical regularities in the network's connectivity. Although many methods exist, the No Free Lunch theorem for community detection implies that each makes some kind of tradeoff, and no algorithm can be optimal on all inputs. Thus, different algorithms will over or underfit on different inputs, finding more, fewer, or just different communities than is optimal, and evaluation methods that use a metadata partition as a ground truth will produce misleading conclusions about general accuracy. Here, we present a broad evaluation of over and underfitting in community detection, comparing the behavior of 16 state-of-the-art community detection algorithms on a novel and structurally diverse corpus of 406 real-world networks. We find that (i) algorithms vary widely both in the number of communities they find and in their corresponding composition, given the same input, (ii) algorithms can be clustered into distinct high-level groups based on similarities of their outputs on real-world networks, and (iii) these differences induce wide variation in accuracy on link prediction and link description tasks. We introduce a new diagnostic for evaluating overfitting and underfitting in practice, and use it to roughly divide community detection methods into general and specialized learning algorithms. Across methods and inputs, Bayesian techniques based on the stochastic block model and a minimum description length approach to regularization represent the best general learning approach, but can be outperformed under specific circumstances. These results introduce both a theoretically principled approach to evaluate over and underfitting in models of network community structure and a realistic benchmark by which new methods may be evaluated and compared.