A fast parallel modularity optimization algorithm (FPMQA) for community detection in online social network

Abstract

As information technology has advanced, people are turning more frequently to electronic media for communication, and social relationships are increasingly found in online channels. Discovering the latent communities therein is a useful way to better understand the properties of a virtual social network. Traditional community-detection tasks only consider the structural characteristics of a social organization, but more information about nodes and edges such as semantic information cannot be exploited. What is more, the typical size of virtual spaces is now counted in millions, if not billions, of nodes and edges, most existing algorithms are incapable to analyze such large scale dense networks.In this paper, we first introduce an interesting social network model (Interest Network) in which links between two IDs are built if they both participate to the discussions about one or more topics/stories. In this case, we say both of the connected two IDs have the similar interests. Then, the edges of the initial network are updated using the attitude consistency information of the connected ID pairs. For a given ID pair i and j, they may together reply to some topics/IDs. The implicit orientations/attitudes of these two IDs to their together-reply topics/IDs may not be the same. We use a simple statistical method to calculate the attitude consistency, the value of which is between 0 and 1, and the higher value corresponds to a greater degree of consistency of the given ID pair to topics/IDs. The updated network is called Similar-View Network (SVN). In the second part, a fast parallel modularity optimization algorithm (FPMQA) that performs the analogous greedy optimization as CNM and FUC is used to conduct community discovering. By using the parallel manner and sophisticated data structures, its running time is essentially fast, O(kmax(kmax+〈k〉logkmax)). Finally, we propose an evaluation metric, which is based on the reliable ground truths, for online network community detection. In the experimental work, we evaluate our method using real datasets and compare our approach with several previous methods; the results show that our method is more effective and accurate in find potential online communities.