Detection of Community Structures in Dynamic Social Networks Based on Message Distribution and Structural/Attribute Similarities

Abstract

Community detection is a crucial challenge in social network analysis. This task is important because it gives leads to study emerging phenomena. Indeed, it makes it possible to identify the different communities representing individuals with common interests and/or strong connections between them. In addition, it allows tracking the transformation of these communities over time. In this work, we propose a dynamic community detection approach called Attributes, Structure, and Messages distribution-based approach (ASMsg). In addition to the node attributes and the topological structure of the network, we use the rate of transferred messages as the key concept of this approach. Therefore, we obtain communities with similar members that are strongly connected and also frequently interacting. Furthermore, the proposed approach is able to detect all possible communities’ transformations even if the communities are overlapped. To demonstrate its efficiency, we widely test ASMsg on artificial and real-world dynamic networks and compare it with representative methods. The results show the superiority of our approach in terms of detected communities.

Keywords

• Community detection
• dynamic social networks
• attributed networks
• community evolution
• overlapping communities