Hidden Community Detection in Social Networks
Kun He, Yingru Li, Sucheta Soundarajan, John E. Hopcroft

TL;DR
This paper presents HICODE, a novel method for detecting hidden and dominant community structures in social networks by weakening dominant communities to reveal underlying hidden ones, outperforming existing methods.
Contribution
HICODE introduces a new approach that simultaneously uncovers hidden and dominant communities by adjusting their strengths, addressing a key challenge in network analysis.
Findings
HICODE outperforms state-of-the-art methods in real-world networks.
It uncovers multiple non-redundant communities linked to social attributes.
The method reveals latent communities without known ground truth.
Abstract
We introduce a new paradigm that is important for community detection in the realm of network analysis. Networks contain a set of strong, dominant communities, which interfere with the detection of weak, natural community structure. When most of the members of the weak communities also belong to stronger communities, they are extremely hard to be uncovered. We call the weak communities the hidden community structure. We present a novel approach called HICODE (HIdden COmmunity DEtection) that identifies the hidden community structure as well as the dominant community structure. By weakening the strength of the dominant structure, one can uncover the hidden structure beneath. Likewise, by reducing the strength of the hidden structure, one can more accurately identify the dominant structure. In this way, HICODE tackles both tasks simultaneously. Extensive experiments on real-world…
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Taxonomy
TopicsComplex Network Analysis Techniques · Opinion Dynamics and Social Influence · Network Security and Intrusion Detection
