Community dynamics: Event and role analysis in social network analysis

Abstract

Social networks are analyzed and mined to find communities, or groupings of interrelated entities. Community mining provides this higher level of structure and offers greater understanding, but networks change over time. Their constituent communities change, and the elements of those communities change over time as well. By performing event analysis, the evolutions of communities are abstracted in order to see structure in the dynamic change over time. This higher level of analysis has a counterpart that deals with the fine grain changes in community members with relation to their communities or the global network. We discuss here an approach to analyzing community evolution events and entity role changes to uncover critical information in dynamic networks.