Exploring the transition behavior of nodes in temporal networks based on dynamic community detection

Abstract

Community detection and community evolution tracking are two important tasks in dynamic complex network analysis. Recently, a variety of models and methods have been proposed for detecting the community structure and analyzing their evolution. However, all these methods are only committed to improving the performance of community detection or identifying evolutionary events, ignoring the internal relevance between the structure of each snapshot of the dynamic network and the evolution pattern of communities, especially the structural features of nodes and their dynamic transition behavior. To cope with this problem, we firstly conduct experiments on 15 real-world dynamic networks to explore the transition behavior of nodes in dynamic networks, which is one of the most influential evolutionary patterns in temporal community detection. Firstly, we obtain the temporal community structure based on very successful temporal community detection methods. Secondly, we extract features of nodes based on the structure of the dynamic network, and take the community transition behavior of nodes as the binary classification problem. Finally, we use the decision tree to find the node-level features that have a general impact on node transition. Experiments indicate that the degree and average neighbor degree of nodes have the most common indispensable impact on the node transition behavior, which are very helpful for modeling dynamic complex networks in future.