Exploiting the formation of maximal cliques in social networks

Abstract

In social networking analysis, there exists a fundamental problem called maximal cliques enumeration(MCE), which has been extensively investigated in many fields, including social networks, biological science, etc. As a matter of fact, the formation principle of maximal cliques that can help us to speed up the detection of maximal cliques from social networks is often ignored by most existing research works. Aiming to exploit the formation of maximal cliques in social networks, this paper pioneers a creative research issue on the detection of bases of maximal cliques in social networks. We propose a formal concept analysis-based approach for detecting the bases of maximal cliques and detection theorem. It is believed that our work can provide a new research solution and direction for future topological structure analysis in various complex networking systems.