Graphical Analysis of Social Group Dynamics

TL;DR

This paper introduces a visualization tool for analyzing social group dynamics in networks, aiding in understanding community formation and changes, with experimental validation on Enron email data.

Contribution

It presents a novel visualization tool that facilitates qualitative analysis of social group dynamics, addressing scalability issues in community detection.

Findings

The tool effectively visualizes group creation and merging events.

Experimental results demonstrate the tool's usefulness on Enron email data.

Provides insights into social group evolution patterns.

Abstract

Identifying communities in social networks becomes an increasingly important research problem. Several methods for identifying such groups have been developed, however, qualitative analysis (taking into account the scale of the problem) still poses serious problems. This paper describes a tool for facilitating such an analysis, allowing to visualize the dynamics and supporting localization of different events (such as creation or merging of groups). In the final part of the paper, the experimental results performed using the benchmark data (Enron emails) provide an insight into usefulness of the proposed tool.