Clustering of Links and Clustering of Nodes: Fusion of Knowledge in Social Networks

Abstract

The extraction of knowledge from social networks is an area that has experienced significant growth in recent years. Indeed, thanks to the improvement of storage and calculation capacities, and the heterogeneity of data that can currently be extracted, much effort has been made to go beyond traditional knowledge, by proposing new kinds of patterns that take into account the context. However, while many works were interested in designing new patterns of knowledge or in optimizing existing approaches, few studies have been focused in merging patterns and on the useful knowledge emerging from such fusions. In this work, we focus on two network clustering approaches, able to extract two distinct kinds of patterns, and we seek to understand both the intersections that can exist between them and the knowledge that emerges from their fusion. The first is the classical nodes clustering approach that consists in searching for communities into a network. The second is the search for frequent conceptual links, a new link clustering approach that aims identifying frequent links between groups of nodes sharing common attributes. We propose a set of original measures that aim to evaluate the amount of shared information between these patterns when they are extracted from a same network. These measures are applied to three datasets and demonstrate the interest in simultaneously considering several sources of knowledge.