Leveraging cascading information for community detection in social networks

Abstract

Information exchange among individuals is one of the key factors leading to formation of modular structures in social networks, often referred as communities. In this paper, we devise a novel information diffusion based approach to leverage the latent information exchange among the individuals for identifying communities. Designed an algorithm called PraSar, which has mainly two phases namely seeding and unification. In seeding phase, closely connected groups of nodes called seed communities are identified by analyzing the cascades obtained during information diffusion. In unification phase, the external connections of seed communities are reduced by unifying two or more seed communities. Involvement of cascade that are formed during the diffusion process enables PraSar to operate locally and giving an overall complexity of O(n2). The theoretical foundation of the proposed approach is established by various theorems. Empirical results on diverse real world datasets are evident for the effectiveness and competitiveness of the PraSar algorithm over state-of-the-art community detection algorithms.