Identifying influential nodes in social networks via community structure and influence distribution difference

This paper aims to effectively solve the problem of the influence maximization in social networks.For this purpose,an influence maximization method that can identify influential nodes via the community structure and the influence distribution difference is proposed.Firstly,the network embedding-based community detection approach is developed,by which the social network is divided into several high-quality communities.Secondly,the solution of influence maximization is composed of the candidate stage and the greedy stage.The candidate stage is to select candidate nodes from the interior and the boundary of each community using a heuristic algorithm,and the greedy stage is to determine seed nodes with the largest marginal influence increment from the candidate set through the sub-modular property-based Greedy algorithm.Finally,experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method compared with existing methods,from which one can further find that our work can achieve a good tradeoff between the influence spread and the running time.

Community Discovery with Location-Interaction Disparity in Mobile Social Networks

With the fast-growth of mobile social network, people＇ s interactions are frequently marked with location information, such as longitude and latitude of visited base station. This boom of data has led to considerable interest in research fields such as user behavior mining, trajectory discovery and social demographics. However, there is little research on community discovery in mobile social networks, and this is the problem this work tackles with. In this work, we take advantage of one simple property that people in different locations often belong to different social circles in order to discover communities in these networks. Based on this property, which we referred to as Location-lnteraction Disparity （LID）, we proposed a state network and then define a quality function evaluating community detection results. We also propose a hybrid community- detection algorithm using LID tor discovering location-based communities effectively and efficiently. Experiments on synthesis networks show that this algorithm can run effectively in time and discover communities with high precision. In realworld networks, the method reveals people＇s different social circles in different places with high efficiency.

Advanced Community Identification Model for Social Networks

Community detection in social networks is a hard problem because of the size,and the need of a deep understanding of network structure and functions.While several methods with significant effort in this direction have been devised,an outstanding open problem is the unknown number of communities,it is generally believed that the role of influential nodes that are surrounded by neighbors is very important.In addition,the similarity among nodes inside the same cluster is greater than among nodes from other clusters.Lately,the global and local methods of community detection have been getting more attention.Therefore,in this study,we propose an advanced communitydetection model for social networks in order to identify network communities based on global and local information.Our proposed model initially detects the most influential nodes by using an Eigen score then performs local expansion powered by label propagation.This process is conducted with the same color till nodes reach maximum similarity.Finally,the communities are formed,and a clear community graph is displayed to the user.Our proposed model is completely parameter-free,and therefore,no prior information is required,such as the number of communities,etc.We perform simulations and experiments using well-known synthetic and real network benchmarks,and compare them with well-known state-of-the-art models.The results prove that our model is efficient in all aspects,because it quickly identifies communities in the network.Moreover,it can easily be used for friendship recommendations or in business recommendation systems.

A Combination Approach to Community Detection in Social Networks by Utilizing Structural and Attribute Data

Community detection is one of the important tasks of social network analysis. It has significant practical importance for achieving cost-effective solutions for problems in the area of search engine optimization, spam detection, viral marketing, counter-terrorism, epidemic modeling, etc. In recent years, there has been an exponential growth of online social platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Pinterest and Tumblr, as people can easily connect to each other in the Internet era overcoming geographical barriers. This has brought about new forms of social interaction, dialogue, exchange and collaboration across diverse social networks of unprecedented scales. At the same time, it presents new challenges and demands more effective, as well as scalable, graphmining techniques because the extraction of novel and useful knowledge from massive amount of graph data holds the key to the analysis of social networks in a much larger scale. In this research paper, the problem to find communities within social networks is considered. Existing community detection techniques utilize the topological structure of the social network, but a proper combination of the available attribute data, which represents the properties of the participants or actors, and the structure data of the social network graph is promising for the detection of more accurate and meaningful communities.

Social Networks and Citizen Participation in the Collaborative Community Policing ——A Case Study of S Community in Beijing

It is of great significance to enhance collaborative community policing for crime prevention and better community-police relationships. Understanding the relational structure of collaborative community policing is necessary to pinpoint the pattern of interactions among key actors involved in community policing and improve the effectiveness of network governance. Based on 234 surveys of citizens of S Community in Beijing from April 2017 to May 2017, this paper empirically examines the characteristics of formal network and informal network of citizen participation in the collaborative community policing. Beijing is widely known for its active involvement of neighborhood volunteers in different types of community policing. We focused on four different types of interpersonal work relationships in this study： workflow, problem solving, mentoring and friendship, among resident committees, neighborhood administrative offices, media, police station, business security personnel, neighborhood volunteers, and security activists. The nature of relationships between individuals in networks can be treated as from instrumental ties to expressive ties. Expressive ties cover relationships that involve the exchange of friendship, trust, and socio-emotional support. We extended this intra-organizational insight into a community policing inter-organizational context. The collaborative network showed the trend of the distributed network. The clustering analysis showed that in the workflow network, we should make thll use of the close interaction between the citizens and activists in the community. Meanwhile, in the problem-solving network, mentoring network and friendship network, interactions between citizens and neighborhood committee are weak.

An efficient shortest path approach for social networks based on community structure

Finding the shortest path （SP） in a large-scale network analysis between any two nodes is a tough but very significant task. The SP can help us to analyze the information spreading performance and research the latent relationship in the weighted social network, and so on. As the size of the social network increases, the traditional SP algorithms have poor performance and there is not a suitable algorithm for weighted social network. Some features of the network analysis are beneficial to solve this problem, and community structure ignored by the traditional methods is one of the most important features. In this paper, we propose a shortest path algorithm based on community detection （SPCD） by integrating community detection algorithm with traditional search methods. SPCD constructs a community graph by using community structure to narrow the searching scope. The algorithm presented improves the time efficiency and maintains the accuracy scale of the SR Experimental results on five real-world networks demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods for the SP problem.

Community Detection in Dynamic Social Networks

There are many community detection algorithms for discovering communities in networks, but very few deal with networks that change structure. The SCAN (Structural Clustering Algorithm for Networks) algorithm is one of these algorithms that detect communities in static networks. To make SCAN more effective for the dynamic social networks that are continually changing their structure, we propose the algorithm DSCAN (Dynamic SCAN) which improves SCAN to allow it to update a local structure in less time than it would to run SCAN on the entire network. We also improve SCAN by removing the need for parameter tuning. DSCAN, tested on real world dynamic networks, performs faster and comparably to SCAN from one timestamp to another, relative to the size of the change. We also devised an approach to genetic algorithms for detecting communities in dynamic social networks, which performs well in speed and modularity.

Community Analysis of Social Network in MMOG

Massive Multiplayer Online Games (MMOG) have attracted millions of players in recent years. In MMOG, players organize themselves voluntarily and fulfill collective tasks together. Because each player can join different activities, one player may show different social relationship with others in different activities. In the paper we proposed the incremental label propagation algorithm to search the cliques accurately and quickly. Then we analyzed community structure characteristics on multi-activities. It's shown that the existing guild organization cannot satisfy the requirements of multi-activities in MMOG, which motivates us to devise new community communication channels and platforms in future.

Social Opinion Network Analytics in Community Based Customer Churn Prediction

Community based churn prediction,or the assignment of recognising the influence of a customer’s community in churn prediction has become an important concern for firms in many different industries.While churn prediction until recent times have focused only on transactional dataset(targeted approach),the untargeted approach through product advisement,digital marketing and expressions in customer’s opinion on the social media like Twitter,have not been fully harnessed.Although this data source has become an important influencing factor with lasting impact on churn management.Since Social Network Analysis(SNA)has become a blended approach for churn prediction and management in modern era,customers residing online predominantly and collectively decide and determines the momentum of churn prediction,retention and decision support.In existing SNA approaches,customers are classified as churner or non-churner(1 or 0).Oftentimes,the customer’s opinion is also neglected and the network structure of community members are not exploited.Consequently,the pattern and influential abilities of customers’opinion on relative members of the community are not analysed.Thus,the research developed a Churn Service Information Graph(CSIG)to define a quadruple churn category(churner,potential churner,inertia customer,premium customer)for non-opinionated customers via the power of relative affinity around opinionated customers on a direct node to node SNA.The essence is to use data mining technique to investigate the patterns of opinion between people in a network or group.Consequently,every member of the online social network community is dynamically classified into a churn category for an improved targeted customer acquisition,retention and/or decision supports in churn management.

Roles of mutual help of local community networks in community health activities: Improvement for the quality of life of older people in Thailand

Objectives: This study aimed to describe work and activities of community networks focusing on the improvement of the quality of life (QOL) of older people in Thailand.The understanding of the work can help enhancing the community development and strengthening of local communities and their networks.Methods: Qualitative methods including in-depth interview,observation,and focus group discussion were employed to the study.64 participants participated to the study and were recruited from 4 key actors within the community.Content analysis was used to analyze the obtained data.This study was conducted in 6 local administrative organizations (LAOs) which selected from the outstanding areas of the project.Each LAO represents one sub-district of the regions of Thailand namely;(1) the upper north,(2) the lower north,(3)the upper eastern,(4) the lower eastern,(5) the central and (6) the south.Results: The findings of this study were categorized into three main themes: (1) Social capital including people in the community,social groups,and organizations,(2) Mutual help/collaboration activities composed of six sets of activities related to social capitals working on the improvement of QOL of older people,and (3) Impacts of the mutual help/collaboration activities on older people and local communities who help to improve of QOL of older people.Conclusion: The findings are important features for the community development.These themes should be recommended for community nurses,health related groups and organizations for the improvement of QOL of older people in the community.

Community Detection in Dynamic Social Networks Based on Multiobjective Immune Algorithm

Community structure is one of the most has received an enormous amount of attention in recent important properties in social networks, and community detection years. In dynamic networks, the communities may evolve over time so that pose more challenging tasks than in static ones. Community detection in dynamic networks is a problem which can naturally be formulated with two contradictory objectives and consequently be solved by multiobjective optimization algorithms. In this paper, a novel nmltiobjective immune algorithm is proposed to solve the community detection problem in dynamic networks. It employs the framework of nondominated neighbor immune algorithm to simultaneously optimize the modularity and normalized mutual information, which quantitatively measure the quality of the community partitions and temporal cost, respectively. The problem-specific knowledge is incorporated in genetic operators and local search to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of our method. Experimental studies based on four synthetic datasets and two real-world social networks demonstrate that our algorithm can not only find community structure and capture community evolution more accurately but also be more steadily than the state-of-the-art algorithms.

Mutually Enhancing Community Detection and Sentiment Analysis on Twitter Networks

The burgeoning use of Web 2.0-powered social media in recent years has inspired numerous studies on the content and composition of online social networks (OSNs). Many methods of harvesting useful information from social networks’ immense amounts of user-generated data have been successfully applied to such real-world topics as politics and marketing, to name just a few. This study presents a novel twist on two popular techniques for studying OSNs: community detection and sentiment analysis. Using sentiment classification to enhance community detection and community partitions to permit more in-depth analysis of sentiment data, these two techniques are brought together to analyze four networks from the Twitter OSN. The Twitter networks used for this study are extracted from four accounts related to Microsoft Corporation, and together encompass more than 60,000 users and 2 million tweets collected over a period of 32 days. By combining community detection and sentiment analysis, modularity values were increased for the community partitions detected in three of the four networks studied. Furthermore, data collected during the community detection process enabled more granular, community-level sentiment analysis on a specific topic referenced by users in the dataset.

Graph Transformer for Communities Detection in Social Networks

Graphs are used in various disciplines such as telecommunication,biological networks,as well as social networks.In large-scale networks,it is challenging to detect the communities by learning the distinct properties of the graph.As deep learning hasmade contributions in a variety of domains,we try to use deep learning techniques to mine the knowledge from large-scale graph networks.In this paper,we aim to provide a strategy for detecting communities using deep autoencoders and obtain generic neural attention to graphs.The advantages of neural attention are widely seen in the field of NLP and computer vision,which has low computational complexity for large-scale graphs.The contributions of the paper are summarized as follows.Firstly,a transformer is utilized to downsample the first-order proximities of the graph into a latent space,which can result in the structural properties and eventually assist in detecting the communities.Secondly,the fine-tuning task is conducted by tuning variant hyperparameters cautiously,which is applied to multiple social networks(Facebook and Twitch).Furthermore,the objective function(crossentropy)is tuned by L0 regularization.Lastly,the reconstructed model forms communities that present the relationship between the groups.The proposed robust model provides good generalization and is applicable to obtaining not only the community structures in social networks but also the node classification.The proposed graph-transformer shows advanced performance on the social networks with the average NMIs of 0.67±0.04,0.198±0.02,0.228±0.02,and 0.68±0.03 on Wikipedia crocodiles,Github Developers,Twitch England,and Facebook Page-Page networks,respectively.

Fake Reviews Tell No Tales？ Dissecting Click Farming in Content-Generated Social Networks

Recently, there has been a radial shift from traditional online social networks to content-generated social networks(CGSNs). Contemporary CGSNs, such as Dianping and Trip Advisor, are often the targets of click farming in which fake reviews are posted in order to boost or diminish the ratings of listed products and services simply through clicking. Click farming often emanates from a collection of multiple fake or compromised accounts, which we call click farmers. In this paper, we conduct a three-phase methodology to detect click farming. We begin by clustering communities based on newly-defined collusion networks. We then apply the Louvain community detection method to detecting communities. We finally perform a binary classification on detected-communities. Our results of over a year-long study show that(1) the prevalence of click farming is different across CGSNs;(2) most click farmers are lowly-rated;(3) click-farming communities have relatively tight relations between users;(4) more highly-ranked stores have a greater portion of fake reviews.

Research community detection from multi-relation researcher network based on structure/attribute similarities

Purpose: This paper aims to provide a method to detect research communities based on research interest in researcher network, which combines the topological structure and vertex attributes in a unified manner.Design/methodology/approach: A heterogeneous researcher network has been constructed by combining multiple relations of academic researchers. Vertex attributes and their similarities were considered and calculated. An approach has been proposed and tested to detect research community in research organizations based on this multi-relation researcher network.Findings: Detection of topologically well-connected, semantically coherent and meaningful research community was achieved.Research limitations: The sample size of evaluation experiments was relatively small. In the present study, a limited number of 72 researchers were analyzed for constructing researcher network and detecting research community. Therefore, a large sample size is required to give more information and reliable results.Practical implications: The proposed multi-relation researcher network and approaches for discovering research communities of similar research interests will contribute to collective innovation behavior such as brainstorming and to promote interdisciplinary cooperation.Originality/value: Recent researches on community detection devote most efforts to singlerelation researcher networks and put the main focus on the topological structure of networks.In reality, there exist multi-relation social networks. Vertex attribute also plays an important role in community detection. The present study combined multiple single-relational researcher networks into a multi-relational network and proposed a structure-attribute clustering method for detecting research community in research organizations.

Balanced Multi-Label Propagation for Overlapping Community Detection in Social Networks

In this paper, we propose a balanced multi-label propagation algorithm （BMLPA） for overlapping community detection in social networks. As well as its fast speed, another important advantage of our method is good stability, which other multi-label propagation algorithms, such as COPRA, lack. In BMLPA, we propose a new update strategy, which requires that community identifiers of one vertex should have balanced belonging coefficients. The advantage of this strategy is that it allows vertices to belong to any number of communities without a global limit on the largest number of community memberships, which is needed for COPRA. Also, we propose a fast method to generate ＂rough cores＂, which can be used to initialize labels for multi-label propagation algorithms, and are able to improve the quality and stability of results. Experimental results on synthetic and real social networks show that BMLPA is very efficient and effective for uncovering overlapping communities.

Emergence of Community Structure in the Adaptive Social Networks

In this paper,we propose a simple model of opinion dynamics to construct social networks,based on the algorithm of link rewiring of local attachment(RLA)and global attachment(RGA).Generality,the system does reach a steady state where all individuals'opinion and the complex network structure are fixed.The RGA enhances the ability of consensus of opinion formation.Furthermore,by tuning a model parameter p,which governs the proportion of RLA and RGA,we find the formation of hierarchical structure in the social networks for p>p_(c).Here,p_(c) is related to the complex network size N and the minimal coordination number 2K.The model also reproduces many features of large social networks,including the“weak links”property.

A Genetic Algorithm for Identifying Overlapping Communities in Social Networks Using an Optimized Search Space

There are currently many approaches to identify the community structure of a network, but relatively few specific to detect overlapping community structures. Likewise, there are few networks with ground truth overlapping nodes. For this reason,we introduce a new network, Pilgrim, with known overlapping nodes, and a new genetic algorithm for detecting such nodes. Pilgrim is comprised of a variety of structures including two communities with dense overlap,which is common in real social structures. This study initially explores the potential of the community detection algorithm LabelRank for consistent overlap detection;however, the deterministic nature of this algorithm restricts it to very few candidate solutions. Therefore, we propose a genetic algorithm using a restricted edge-based clustering technique to detect overlapping communities by maximizing an efficient overlapping modularity function. The proposed restriction to the edge-based representation precludes the possibility of disjoint communities, thereby, dramatically reducing the search space and decreasing the number of generations required to produce an optimal solution. A tunable parameterr allows the strictness of the definition of overlap to be adjusted allowing for refinement in the number of identified overlapping nodes. Our method, tested on several real social networks, yields results comparable to the most effective overlapping community detection algorithms to date.

The social determinants of health influencing obesity for the aged in the Pakpoon community context:A qualitative study

Objective:This study aimed to describe the social determinants of health influencing obesity for the aged in a community context and based on the perspectives of various stakeholders.Methods:This was qualitative content analysis study using data from the focus group,individual in-depth interview,and observation.The study population was domiciled in Pakpoon Village,Mung Dis-trict,Nakhon Si Thammarat Province,a tight-knit settlement typical of most retirement communities.Data were collected through two focus group discussions,direct observation,and in-depth interviews with 19 participants.Respondents represented key community groups:local nurses and public health officers,elderly residents,family caregivers(family members),and village health volunteers.Results:The participants shared similar perspectives about the social determinants of health influencing obesity in the aged,which spanned three themes.These were:1)neighborhood food environment(easy access to unhealthy food,no choice to recruit healthy food);2)social networks influencing obesity(family affects food choices and prohibitions on exercise;belief,and socially imposed body image per-ceptions contributing to obesity in the aged);and 3)knowledge,attitudes,and beliefs behind lifestyle choices that cause obesity in the elderly(lack of awareness,personal attitudes,job and familial duties as barriers to engaging in physical activities;over-consumption behaviors lead to obesity in older people).Conclusion:These three themes were the root causes of obesity in the elderly in Pakpoon’s retirement community.This finding suggests that policymakers and nurses can create healthy environments,both to treat and prevent obesity,by raising awareness in younger generations,providing aging the provision of healthy food choices for older adults,encouraging health care professionals to share knowledge,and by modifying the attitudes and beliefs of both caregivers and older adults.

The Influence Factors of Collective Intelligence Emergence in Knowledge Communities Based on Social Network Analysis

The advent of the age of Information shifts the environment we live in from off-line to on-line. The prospect of Collective Intelligence (CI) is promising. Based on this background, the aim of this paper is to discover the emergence mechanism and influence factors of CI in knowledge communities using the method of quantitative and qualitative analysis. On the basis of the previous research work, our model theorizes that the two dimensions of social network (i.e., interactive network structure and participant’s characteristics) affect two references of effectiveness (i.e. group knowledge production and participation of group decision). And this hypothetical model is validated with simulation data from “Zhihu” community. Our model has been useful since it offers some inspirations and directions to promote the level of CI in knowledge communities.