Discovering dynamic communities in interaction networks

Abstract

Online social networks are often defined by considering interactions over large time intervals, e.g., consider pairs of individuals who have called each other at least once in a mobilie-operator network, or users who have made a conversation in a social-media site. Although such a definition can be valuable in many graph-mining tasks, it suffers from a severe limitation: it neglects the precise time that the interaction between network nodes occurs. In this paper we study interaction networks, where one considers not only the social-network topology, but also the exact time that nodes interact. In an interaction network an edge is associated with a time stamp, and multiple edges may occur for the same pair of nodes. Consequently, interaction networks offer a more fine-grained representation that can be used to reveal otherwise hidden dynamic phenomena in the network. We consider the problem of discovering communities in interaction networks, which are dense and whose edges occur in short time intervals. Such communities represent groups of individuals who interact with each other in some specific time instances, for example, a group of employees who work on a project and whose interaction intensifies before certain project milestones.We prove that the problem we define is NP-hard, and we provide effective algorithms by adapting techniques used to find dense subgraphs. We perform extensive evaluation of the proposed methods on synthetic and real datasets, which demonstrates the validity of our concepts and the good performance of our algorithms. © 2014 Springer-Verlag.