Abstract

The growing popularity of online social networks gave researchers access to large amount of network data and renewed interest in methods for automatic community detection. Existing algorithms, including the popular modularity-optimization methods, look for regions of the network that are better connected internally, e.g., have higher than expected number of edges within them. We believe, however, that edges do not give the true measure of network connectivity. Instead, we argue that influence, which we define as the number of paths, of any length, that exist between two nodes, gives a better measure of network connectivity. We use the influence metric to partition a network into groups or communities by looking for regions of the network where nodes have more influence over each other than over nodes outside the community. We evaluate our approach on several networks and show that it often …

Date

August 24, 2008

Authors

Rumi Ghosh, Kristina Lerman

Book

International Workshop on Social Network Mining and Analysis

Pages

20-35

Publisher

Springer Berlin Heidelberg