In the era of mobile computing, understanding human mobility patterns is crucial in order to better design protocols and applications. Many studies focus on different aspects of human mobility such as people's points of interests, routes, traffic, individual mobility patterns, among others. In this work, we propose to look at human mobility through a social perspective, i.e., analyze the impact of social groups in mobility patterns. We use the MIT Reality Mining proximity trace to detect, track and investigate group's evolution throughout time. Our results show that group meetings happen in a periodical fashion and present daily and weekly periodicity. We analyze how groups' dynamics change over day hours and find that group meetings lasting longer are those with less changes in members composition and with members having stronger social bonds with each other. Our findings can be used to propose meeting prediction algorithms, opportunistic routing and information diffusion protocols, taking advantage of those revealed properties.
To perform group characterization from mobility traces' analysis, we apply community detection methods. Since its introduction, community detection in complex networks have attracted a lot of attention. Algorithms for community detection can be classified according to two characteristics: overlapping versus non-overlapping, and static versus dynamic graphs. Among many proposed algorithms, the studies in @cite_6 and @cite_13 have remarked themselves as the most popular and effective algorithms for community detection in static graphs. Studies such as @cite_0 aim to propose adaptations and new algorithms that are suited for dynamics graphs, considering computational efficiency issues. In our study, we use these developed methodologies, specifically @cite_6 , to detect and characterize social groups dynamics looking at proximity traces.
@cite_0 @cite_13 @cite_6
2079149066 2242878970 1976160665 1565608089
Four major factors govern the intricacies of community extraction in networks: (1) the literature offers a multitude of disparate community detection algorithms whose output exhibits high structural variability across the collection, (2) communities identified by algorithms may differ structurally from real communities that arise in practice, (3) there is no consensus characterizing how to discriminate communities from noncommunities, and (4) the application domain includes a wide variety of networks of fundamentally different natures. In this article, we present a class separability framework to tackle these challenges through a comprehensive analysis of community properties. Our approach enables the assessment of the structural dissimilarity among the output of multiple community detection algorithms and between the output of algorithms and communities that arise in practice. In addition, our method provides us with a way to organize the vast collection of community detection algorithms by grouping those that behave similarly. Finally, we identify the most discriminative graph-theoretical properties of community signature and the small subset of properties that account for most of the biases of the different community detection algorithms. We illustrate our approach with an experimental analysis, which reveals nuances of the structure of real and extracted communities. In our experiments, we furnish our framework with the output of 10 different community detection procedures, representative of categories of popular algorithms available in the literature, applied to a diverse collection of large-scale real network datasets whose domains span biology, online shopping, and social systems. We also analyze communities identified by annotations that accompany the data, which reflect exemplar communities in various domain. We characterize these communities using a broad spectrum of community properties to produce the different structural classes. As our experiments show that community structure is not a universal concept, our framework enables an informed choice of the most suitable community detection method for identifying communities of a specific type in a given network and allows for a comparison of existing community detection algorithms while guiding the design of new ones. Community detection is a common problem in various types of big graphs. It is meaningful to understand the functions and dynamics of networks. The challenges of detecting community for big graphs include high computational cost, no prior information, etc.. In this work, we analyze the process of random walking in graphs, and find out that the weight of an edge gotten by processing the vertices visited by the walker could be an indicator to measure the closeness of vertex connection. Based on this idea, we propose a community detection algorithm for undirected big graphs which consists of three steps, including random walking using a single walker, weight calculating for edges and community detecting. Our algorithm is running in O(n2) without prior information. Experimental results show that our algorithm is capable of detecting the community structure and the overlapping parts of graphs in real-world effectively, and handling the challenges of community detection in big graph era. Graph clustering has been widely applied in exploring regularities emerging in relational data. Recently, the rapid development of network theory correlates graph clustering with the detection of community structure, a common and important topological characteristic of networks. Most existing methods investigate the community structure at a single topological scale. However, as shown by empirical studies, the community structure of real world networks often exhibits multiple topological descriptions, corresponding to the clustering at different resolutions. Furthermore, the detection of multiscale community structure is heavily affected by the heterogeneous distribution of node degree. It is very challenging to detect multiscale community structure in heterogeneous networks. In this paper, we propose a novel, unified framework for detecting community structure from the perspective of dimensionality reduction. Based on the framework, we first prove that the well-known Laplacian matrix for network partition and the widely-used modularity matrix for community detection are two kinds of covariance matrices used in dimensionality reduction. We then propose a novel method to detect communities at multiple topological scales within our framework. We further show that existing algorithms fail to deal with heterogeneous node degrees. We develop a novel method to handle heterogeneity of networks by introducing a rescaling transformation into the covariance matrices in our framework. Extensive tests on real world and artificial networks demonstrate that the proposed correlation matrices significantly outperform Laplacian and modularity matrices in terms of their ability to identify multiscale community structure in heterogeneous networks. Community detection is a common problem in graph data analytics that consists of finding groups of densely connected nodes with few connections to nodes outside of the group. In particular, identifying communities in large-scale networks is an important task in many scientific domains. In this review, we evaluated eight state-of-the-art and five traditional algorithms for overlapping and disjoint community detection on large-scale real-world networks with known ground-truth communities. These 13 algorithms were empirically compared using goodness metrics that measure the structural properties of the identified communities, as well as performance metrics that evaluate these communities against the ground-truth. Our results show that these two types of metrics are not equivalent. That is, an algorithm may perform well in terms of goodness metrics, but poorly in terms of performance metrics, or vice versa. © 2014 The Authors. WIREs Computational