A method for group extraction in complex social networks

Abstract

The extraction of social groups from social networks existing among employees in the company, its customers or users of various computer systems became one of the research areas of growing importance. Once we have discovered the groups, we can utilise them, in different kinds of recommender systems or in the analysis of the team structure and communication within a given population. The shortcomings of the existing methods for community discovery and lack of their applicability in multi-layered social networks were the inspiration to create a new group extraction method in complex multi-layered social networks. The main idea that stands behind this new concept is to utilise the modified version of a measure called by authors multi-layered clustering coefficient. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.