Attributed community search based on seed replacement and joint random walk

Community search enables personalized community discovery and has wide applications in real-life scenarios. Existing attributed community search algorithms use personalized information provided by attributes to locate desired community. Though achieved promising results, existing works suffer from two major limitations: (i) the precision of the algorithm decreases significantly when the seed comes from the boundary regions of the community. (ii) Most attributed community search methods mainly take the attribute information as edge weights to reveal semantic strength (e.g., attribute similarity, attribute distance, etc.), but largely ignore that attribute may serve as heterogeneous vertex. To make up for these deficiencies, in this paper, we propose a novel two-stage attributed community search method with seed replacement and joint random walk (SRRW). Specifically, in the seed replacement stage, we replace the initial query node with a core node; in the random walk stage, attributes are taken as heterogeneous nodes and the augmented graph is modeled based on the affiliation of the attributes via an overlapping clustering algorithm. And finally, a joint random walk is performed on the augmented graph to explore the desired local community. We conduct extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world benchmarks, demonstrating its effectiveness for attributed community search.