Finding Communities in Dynamic Social Networks

Abstract

Communities are natural structures observed in social networks and are usually characterized as "relatively dense" subsets of nodes. Social networks change over time and so do the underlying community structures. Thus, to truly uncover this structure we must take the temporal aspect of networks into consideration. Previously, we have represented framework for finding dynamic communities using the social cost model and formulated the corresponding optimization problem [33], assuming that partitions of individuals into groups are given in each time step. We have also presented heuristics and approximation algorithms for the problem, with the same assumption [32]. In general, however, dynamic social networks are represented as a sequence of graphs of snapshots of the social network and the assumption that we have partitions of individuals into groups does not hold. In this paper, we extend the social cost model and formulate an optimization problem of finding community structure from the sequence of arbitrary graphs. We propose a semi definite programming formulation and a heuristic rounding scheme. We show, using synthetic data sets, that this method is quite accurate on synthetic data sets and present its results on a real social network.