Identifying communities by influence dynamics in social networks

TL;DR

This paper introduces a dynamic community detection algorithm for social networks that identifies leaders, overlapping communities, and influential nodes by modeling social interactions and evolution processes.

Contribution

The novel algorithm combines network structure with social dynamics to detect communities, leaders, and overlapping memberships, focusing specifically on social network behaviors.

Findings

Successfully applied to real social networks

Identifies leaders and overlapping communities

Reveals influential nodes and their roles

Abstract

Communities are not static; they evolve, split and merge, appear and disappear, i.e. they are product of dynamical processes that govern the evolution of the network. A good algorithm for community detection should not only quantify the topology of the network, but incorporate the dynamical processes that take place on the network. We present a novel algorithm for community detection that combines network structure with processes that support creation and/or evolution of communities. The algorithm does not embrace the universal approach but instead tries to focus on social networks and model dynamic social interactions that occur on those networks. It identifies leaders, and communities that form around those leaders. It naturally supports overlapping communities by associating each node with a membership vector that describes node's involvement in each community. This way, in addition to overlapping communities, we can identify nodes that are good followers to their leader, and also nodes with no clear community involvement that serve as a proxy between several communities and are equally as important. We run the algorithm for several real social networks which we believe represent a good fraction of the wide body of social networks and discuss the results including other possible applications.