Researchers have devoted themselves to exploring static features of social networks and further discovered many representative characteristics, such as power law in the degree distribution and assortative value used to differentiate social networks from nonsocial ones. However, people are not satisfied with these achievements and more and more attention has been paid on how to uncover those dynamic characteristics of social networks, especially how to track community evolution effectively. With these interests, in the paper we firstly display some basic but dynamic features of social networks. Then on its basis, we propose a novel core-based algorithm of tracking community evolution, CommTracker, which depends on core nodes to establish the evolving relationships among communities at different snapshots. With the algorithm, we discover two unique phenomena in social networks and further propose two representative coefficients: GROWTH and METABOLISM by which we are also able to distinguish social networks from nonsocial ones from the dynamic aspect. At last, we have developed a social network model which has the capabilities of exhibiting two necessary features above.
As forerunners, A.L.Barabasi and H.Jeong study static characteristic variations on the network of scientific collaboration @cite_15 . Gergely Palla and A.-L. Barabasi provide a method which effectively utilizes edge overlapping to build evolving relationship @cite_4 . With the approach, they discover valuable phenomena of social community evolution.
@cite_15 @cite_4
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The co-authorship network of scientists represents a prototype of complex evolving networks. In addition, it offers one of the most extensive database to date on social networks. By mapping the electronic database containing all relevant journals in mathematics and neuro-science for an 8-year period (1991–98), we infer the dynamic and the structural mechanisms that govern the evolution and topology of this complex system. Three complementary approaches allow us to obtain a detailed characterization. First, empirical measurements allow us to uncover the topological measures that characterize the network at a given moment, as well as the time evolution of these quantities. The results indicate that the network is scale-free, and that the network evolution is governed by preferential attachment, affecting both internal and external links. However, in contrast with most model predictions the average degree increases in time, and the node separation decreases. Second, we propose a simple model that captures the network's time evolution. In some limits the model can be solved analytically, predicting a two-regime scaling in agreement with the measurements. Third, numerical simulations are used to uncover the behavior of quantities that could not be predicted analytically. The combined numerical and analytical results underline the important role internal links play in determining the observed scaling behavior and network topology. The results and methodologies developed in the context of the co-authorship network could be useful for a systematic study of other complex evolving networks as well, such as the world wide web, Internet, or other social networks. The processes by which communities come together, attract new members, and develop over time is a central research issue in the social sciences - political movements, professional organizations, and religious denominations all provide fundamental examples of such communities. In the digital domain, on-line groups are becoming increasingly prominent due to the growth of community and social networking sites such as MySpace and LiveJournal. However, the challenge of collecting and analyzing large-scale time-resolved data on social groups and communities has left most basic questions about the evolution of such groups largely unresolved: what are the structural features that influence whether individuals will join communities, which communities will grow rapidly, and how do the overlaps among pairs of communities change over time.Here we address these questions using two large sources of data: friendship links and community membership on LiveJournal, and co-authorship and conference publications in DBLP. Both of these datasets provide explicit user-defined communities, where conferences serve as proxies for communities in DBLP. We study how the evolution of these communities relates to properties such as the structure of the underlying social networks. We find that the propensity of individuals to join communities, and of communities to grow rapidly, depends in subtle ways on the underlying network structure. For example, the tendency of an individual to join a community is influenced not just by the number of friends he or she has within the community, but also crucially by how those friends are connected to one another. We use decision-tree techniques to identify the most significant structural determinants of these properties. We also develop a novel methodology for measuring movement of individuals between communities, and show how such movements are closely aligned with changes in the topics of interest within the communities.