Mining heterogeneous social networks for egocentric information abstraction

Abstract

Social network is a powerful data structure that allows the depiction of relationship information between entities. However, real-world social networks are sometimes too complex for human to pursue further analysis. In this work, an unsupervised mechanism is proposed for egocentric information abstraction in heterogeneous social networks. To achieve this goal, we propose a vector space representation for heterogeneous social networks to identify combination of relations as features and compute statistical dependencies as feature values. These features, either linear or eyelie, intend to capture the semantic information in the surrounding environment of the ego. Then we design three abstraction measures to distill representative and important information to construct the abstracted graphs for visual presentation. The evaluations conducted on a real world movie datasct and an artificial crime dataset demonstrate that the abstractions can indeed retain significant information and facilitate more accurate and efficient human analysis. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Wien.