Tracking Group Evolution in Social Networks

TL;DR

This paper introduces GED, a new method for extracting and analyzing the evolution of social groups over time within temporal social networks, enabling better understanding of community dynamics.

Contribution

The paper presents GED, a novel approach for tracking and analyzing social community evolution in temporal networks, filling a gap in existing methods.

Findings

GED effectively captures group evolution over time

The method provides detailed group change histories

GED improves understanding of social community dynamics

Abstract

Easy access and vast amount of data, especially from long period of time, allows to divide social network into timeframes and create temporal social network. Such network enables to analyse its dynamics. One aspect of the dynamics is analysis of social communities evolution, i.e., how particular group changes over time. To do so, the complete group evolution history is needed. That is why in this paper the new method for group evolution extraction called GED is presented.