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.