Reducing interactions in social media: A mathematical approach

Abstract

Networks arise in many diverse contexts, ranging from web pages and their links, computer networks, and social networks interactions. The modelling and mining of these large-scale, self-organizing systems is a broad effort spanning many disciplines. This article proposes the use of morphological operators, based on Mathematical Morphology, to simplify a set of interactions in Twitter, that can be considered as a complex network. By applying these techniques, it is possible to simplify the social network and thus identify important interactions, communities and actors in the network. Reducing interactions is then, a crucial step for simplify and understand the networks. An analysis based on the visualization of the simplification was carried out to verify the pertinence of the proposed technique.