Local community detection in multiple private networks

Abstract

Individuals are often involved in multiple online social networks. Considering that owners of these networks are unwilling to share their networks, some global algorithms combine information from multiple networks to detect all communities in multiple networks without sharing their edges. When data owners are only interested in the community containing a given node, it is unnecessary and computationally expensive for multiple networks to interact with each other to mine all communities. Moreover, data owners who are specifically looking for a community typically prefer to provide less data than the global algorithms require. Therefore, we propose the Local Collaborative Community Detection problem (LCCD). It exploits information from multiple networks to jointly detect the local community containing a given node, without directly sharing edges between networks. To address the LCCD problem, we present a method developed from M method, called colM, to detect the local community in multiple networks. This method adopts secure multiparty computation protocols to protect each network’s private information. Our experiments were conducted on real-world and synthetic datasets. Experimental results show that colM method could effectively identify community structures and outperform comparison algorithms.