Event-based services have recently witnessed a rapid growth driving the way people explore and share information of interest. They host a huge amount of users' activities including explicit RSVP, shared photos, comments and social connections. Exploiting these activities to detect communities of similar users is a challenging problem. In reality, a community in event-based social network (ESBN) is a group of users not only sharing common events and friends, but also having similar topical interests. However, such community could not be detected by most of existing methods which mainly draw on link analysis in the network. To address this problem, there is a need to capitalize on the semantics of shared objects along with the structural properties, and to generate overlapping communities rather than disjoint ones. In this paper, we propose to leverage the users' activities around events with the aim to detect communities based on topical clustering and link analysis that maximize a new form of semantic modularity. We particularly highlight the difference between online and offline social interactions, and the influence of event categories to detect communities. Experimental results on real datasets showed that our approach was able to detect semantically meaningful communities compared with existing state of the art methods.
To overcome the limitation of link-based methods, some studies attempt to exploit topic modeling techniques such as PLSA @cite_5 , LDA @cite_13 , AT @cite_14 that attempt to detect topical communities. For example, the work in @cite_22 makes an analogy between the LDA document-topic-word and the user-topic-websites to discover topical communities. The idea behind is that users sharing similar online access pattern tend to belong to same topical group. Resulting clusters are labeled with extracted keywords from websites. This method primarily relies on the link information in a social graph and it is only efficient when regular interaction patterns could be detected. Another approach @cite_7 proposes Community-User-Topic, an extension model of LDA which detects communities using the semantics of content. Communities are represented as random mixtures over users who are associated with a topical distribution. This method does not consider the link information assuming that community members are only sharing common topics. It is evident that both methods could not be applied in real world social network where users' membership is conditioned on their social relationships and their shared interests.
@cite_14 @cite_22 @cite_7 @cite_5 @cite_13
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This paper tackles the problem of detecting topical communities from within an organization by mining readily available network access pattern information. A Bayesian generative process is used to model the behavior of user's network access pattern and thereby her consumption of online content. The idea is that users within same topical interest group tend to share similar online access patterns. By leveraging this pattern, along with side information of domain-names and keywords within the accessed websites, one is able to model these observations under the framework of a mixed membership statistical model. Hence the access patterns of users-to-websites, as measured at the edge of an organization's network boundary, can be decomposed into constituent topical communities without any human effort in selecting specific features. Experimental results on real-world network flow trace demonstrate that the proposed method can effectively detect topically meaningful community structures. Besides better detection accuracy of communities compared with other community detection methods, the proposed method can detect interesting but non-evident hidden communities which cannot readily be detected by other known methods. In this work, we address the problem of joint modeling of text and citations in the topic modeling framework. We present two different models called the Pairwise-Link-LDA and the Link-PLSA-LDA models. The Pairwise-Link-LDA model combines the ideas of LDA [4] and Mixed Membership Block Stochastic Models [1] and allows modeling arbitrary link structure. However, the model is computationally expensive, since it involves modeling the presence or absence of a citation (link) between every pair of documents. The second model solves this problem by assuming that the link structure is a bipartite graph. As the name indicates, Link-PLSA-LDA model combines the LDA and PLSA models into a single graphical model. Our experiments on a subset of Citeseer data show that both these models are able to predict unseen data better than the baseline model of Erosheva and Lafferty [8], by capturing the notion of topical similarity between the contents of the cited and citing documents. Our experiments on two different data sets on the link prediction task show that the Link-PLSA-LDA model performs the best on the citation prediction task, while also remaining highly scalable. In addition, we also present some interesting visualizations generated by each of the models. Topic models, such as Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), posit that documents are drawn from admixtures of distributions over words, known as topics. The inference problem of recovering topics from admixtures, is NP-hard. Assuming separability, a strong assumption, [4] gave the first provable algorithm for inference. For LDA model, [6] gave a provable algorithm using tensor-methods. But [4,6] do not learn topic vectors with bounded @math error (a natural measure for probability vectors). Our aim is to develop a model which makes intuitive and empirically supported assumptions and to design an algorithm with natural, simple components such as SVD, which provably solves the inference problem for the model with bounded @math error. A topic in LDA and other models is essentially characterized by a group of co-occurring words. Motivated by this, we introduce topic specific Catchwords, group of words which occur with strictly greater frequency in a topic than any other topic individually and are required to have high frequency together rather than individually. A major contribution of the paper is to show that under this more realistic assumption, which is empirically verified on real corpora, a singular value decomposition (SVD) based algorithm with a crucial pre-processing step of thresholding, can provably recover the topics from a collection of documents drawn from Dominant admixtures. Dominant admixtures are convex combination of distributions in which one distribution has a significantly higher contribution than others. Apart from the simplicity of the algorithm, the sample complexity has near optimal dependence on @math , the lowest probability that a topic is dominant, and is better than [4]. Empirical evidence shows that on several real world corpora, both Catchwords and Dominant admixture assumptions hold and the proposed algorithm substantially outperforms the state of the art [5]. In the LDA approach to topic detection, a topic is determined by identifying the words that are used with high frequency when writing about the topic. However, high frequency words in one topic may be also used with high frequency in other topics. Thus they may not be the best words to characterize the topic. In this paper, we propose a new method for topic detection, where a topic is determined by identifying words that appear with high frequency in the topic and low frequency in other topics. We model patterns of word co- occurrence and co-occurrences of those patterns using a hierarchy of discrete latent variables. The states of the latent variables represent clusters of documents and they are interpreted as topics. The words that best distinguish a cluster from other clusters are selected to characterize the topic. Empirical results show that the new method yields topics with clearer thematic characterizations than the alternative approaches.