Community Detection for Heterogeneous Multiple Social Networks

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel community detection method for multiple heterogeneous social networks using nonnegative matrix tri-factorization, effectively identifying overlapping users and improving community fusion across platforms.

Contribution

It proposes a new community detection approach that fuses multiple social networks through a common consensus matrix and alignment matrices for overlapping users.

Findings

Superior performance in community quality metrics

Effective detection of overlapping user communities

Enhanced community fusion across social networks

Abstract

The community plays a crucial role in understanding user behavior and network characteristics in social networks. Some users can use multiple social networks at once for a variety of objectives. These users are called overlapping users who bridge different social networks. Detecting communities across multiple social networks is vital for interaction mining, information diffusion, and behavior migration analysis among networks. This paper presents a community detection method based on nonnegative matrix tri-factorization for multiple heterogeneous social networks, which formulates a common consensus matrix to represent the global fused community. Specifically, the proposed method involves creating adjacency matrices based on network structure and content similarity, followed by alignment matrices which distinguish overlapping users in different social networks. With the generated alignment matrices, the method could enhance the fusion degree of the global community by detecting overlapping user communities across networks. The effectiveness of the proposed method is evaluated with new metrics on Twitter, Instagram, and Tumblr datasets. The results of the experiments demonstrate its superior performance in terms of community quality and community fusion.