Discovering strong communities with user engagement and tie strength

Abstract

In this paper, we propose and study a novel cohesive subgraph model, named (k,s)-core, which requires each user to have at least k familiars or friends (not just acquaintances) in the subgraph. The model considers both user engagement and tie strength to discover strong communities. We compare the (k,s)-core model with k-core and k-truss theoretically and experimentally. We propose efficient algorithms to compute the (k,s)-core and decompose the graph by a particular sub-model k-fami. Extensive experiments show (1) our (k,s)-core and k-fami are effective cohesive subgraph models and (2) the (k,s)-core computation and k-fami decomposition are efficient on various real-life social networks.