Cross-domain community detection in heterogeneous social networks

Abstract

With the recent surge of location-based social networks (LBSNs), e.g., Foursquare and Facebook Places, huge amount of human digital footprints that people leave in the cyber-physical space become accessible, including users' profiles, online social connections, and especially the places that they have checked in. Different from social networks (e.g., Flickr, Facebook) which have explicit groups for users to subscribe or join, LBSNs usually have no explicit community structure. Meanwhile, unlike social networks which only contain a single type of social interaction, the coexistence of online/offline social interactions and user/venue attributes in LBSNs makes the community detection problem much more challenging. In order to capitalize on the large number of potential users/venues as well as the huge amount of heterogeneous social interactions, quality community detection approach is needed. In this paper, by exploring the heterogenous digital footprints of LBSNs users in the cyber-physical space, we come out with a novel edge-centric co-clustering framework to discover overlapping communities. By employing inter-mode as well as intra-mode features, the proposed framework is able to group like-minded users from different social perspectives. The efficacy of our approach is validated by intensive empirical evaluations based on the collected Foursquare dataset.