Community detection in social networks using machine learning: a systematic mapping study

Abstract

One of the important issues in social networks is the social communities which are formed by interactions between its members. Three types of community including overlapping, non-overlapping, and hidden are detected by different approaches. Regarding the importance of community detection in social networks, this paper provides a systematic mapping of machine learning-based community detection approaches. The study aimed to show the type of communities in social networks along with the algorithms of machine learning that have been used for community detection. After carrying out the steps of mapping and removing useless references, 246 papers were selected to answer the questions of this research. The results of the research indicated that unsupervised machine learning-based algorithms with 41.46% (such as k means) are the most used categories to detect communities in social networks due to their low processing overheads. On the other hand, there has been a significant increase in the use of deep learning since 2020 which has sufficient performance for community detection in large-volume data. With regard to the ability of NMI to measure the correlation or similarity between communities, with 53.25%, it is the most frequently used metric to evaluate the performance of community identifications. Furthermore, considering availability, low in size, and lack of multiple edge and loops, dataset Zachary’s Karate Club with 26.42% is the most used dataset for community detection research in social networks.