The increasing importance of Web 2.0 applications during the last years has created significant interest in tools for analyzing and describing collective user activities and emerging phenomena within the Web. Network structures have been widely employed in this context for modeling users, web resources and relations between them. However, the amount of data produced by modern web systems results in networks that are of unprecedented size and complexity, and are thus hard to interpret. To this end, community detection methods attempt to uncover natural groupings of web objects by analyzing the topology of their containing network. There are numerous techniques adopting a global perspective to the community detection problem, i.e. they operate on the complete network structure, thus being computationally expensive and hard to apply in a streaming manner. In order to add a local perspective to the study of the problem, we present Bridge Bounding, a local methodology for community detection, which explores the local network topology around a seed node in order to identify edges that act as boundaries to the local community. The proposed method can be integrated in an efficient global community detection scheme that compares favorably to the state of the art. As a case study, we apply the method to explore the topic structure of the LYCOS iQ collaborative question answering application by detecting communities in the networks created from the collective tagging activity of users.
The problem of community finding in large complex networks has attracted considerable research interest for some time now. Its origins can be traced back to the first studies of the hyperlink structure of the web, e.g. to the observation of @cite_16 that communities emerge spontaneously around authoritative web pages which are identified by means of hub pages. Then, the works by @cite_25 and @cite_12 formally defined and systematically tackled the problem of community detection. In the following, we provide a list of existing methods for community detection classified according to the approach they adopt. A more detailed discussion of existing community detection methods is contained in the survey by @cite_14 .
@cite_14 @cite_16 @cite_25 @cite_12
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Detecting and analyzing dense groups or communities from social and information networks has attracted immense attention over the last decade due to its enormous applicability in different domains. Community detection is an ill-defined problem, as the nature of the communities is not known in advance. The problem has turned even more complicated due to the fact that communities emerge in the network in various forms such as disjoint, overlapping, and hierarchical. Various heuristics have been proposed to address these challenges, depending on the application in hand. All these heuristics have been materialized in the form of new metrics, which in most cases are used as optimization functions for detecting the community structure, or provide an indication of the goodness of detected communities during evaluation. Over the last decade, a large number of such metrics have been proposed. Thus, there arises a need for an organized and detailed survey of the metrics proposed for community detection and evaluation. Here, we present a survey of the start-of-the-art metrics used for the detection and the evaluation of community structure. We also conduct experiments on synthetic and real networks to present a comparative analysis of these metrics in measuring the goodness of the underlying community structure. 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. The evolution of the Web has promoted a growing interest in social network analysis, such as community detection. Among many different community detection approaches, there are two kinds that we want to address: one considers the graph structure of the network (topology-based community detection approach); the other one takes the textual information of the network nodes into consideration (topic-based community detection approach). This paper conducted systematic analysis of applying a topology-based community detection approach and a topic-based community detection approach to the coauthorship networks of the information retrieval area and found that: (1) communities detected by the topology-based community detection approach tend to contain different topics within each community; and (2) communities detected by the topic-based community detection approach tend to contain topologically-diverse sub-communities within each community. The future community detection approaches should not only emphasize the relationship between communities and topics, but also consider the dynamic changes of communities and topics. Recently community detection has attracted much interest in social media to understand the collective behaviours of users and allow individuals to be modeled in the context of the group. Most existing approaches for community detection exploit either users' social links or their published content, aiming at discovering groups of densely connected or highly similar users. They often fail to find effective communities due to excessive noise in content, sparsity in links, and heterogenous behaviours of users in social media. Further, they are unable to provide insights and rationales behind the formation of the group and the collective behaviours of the users. To tackle these challenges, we propose to discover communities in a low- dimensional latent space in which we simultaneously learn the representation of users and communities. In particular, we integrated different social views of the network into a low-dimensional latent space in which we sought dense clusters of users as communities. By imposing a Laplacian regularizer into affiliation matrix, we further incorporated prior knowledge into the community discovery process. Finally community profiles were computed by a linear operator integrating the profiles of members. Taking the wellness domain as an example, we conducted experiments on a large scale real world dataset of users tweeting about diabetes and its related concepts, which demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in discovering and profiling user communities.