Problem In Social Network Analysis Research Articles

IMNE: Maximizing influence through deep learning-based node embedding in social network

Influence Maximization (IM) is a critical problem in social network analysis and marketing. It involves identifying a subset of nodes in a social network whose activation or influence can lead to the maximal spread of information, ideas, or behaviors within the network. Although many approaches have been developed in the literature to deal with this problem, most of these approaches are ineffective in dealing with large-scale social networks due to free parameters and computational complexity. Embeddings are used to learn low-dimensional representations of nodes in a social network. These embeddings capture the structural and semantic information of nodes and their relationships within the network. By training deep learning models on graph-structured data, node embeddings can capture complex patterns and dependencies in social networks, enabling more effective downstream tasks such as IM. Accordingly, this paper proposes an efficient algorithm to address the IM problem in social networks using deep learning-based Node Embedding (IMNE), which includes shell decomposition, graph/node embedding, and search space reduction as well as the use of local structural features. Our approach combines the power of deep learning for representation learning with the rich structural information present in social networks to address the challenge of IM in complex and dynamic social networks. IMNE uses the Independent Cascade (IC) information diffusion model to determine the labels needed to train the model by calculating the influence of nodes. Experimental results on several real-world networks considering different performance metrics show that IMNE performs better compared to existing baseline and state-of-the-art methods.

Experimental analysis and evaluation of cohesive subgraph discovery

Retrieving cohesive subgraphs in networks is a fundamental problem in social network analysis and graph data management. These subgraphs can be used for marketing strategies or recommendation systems. Despite the introduction of numerous models over the years, a systematic comparison of their performance, especially across varied network configurations, remains unexplored. In this study, we evaluated various cohesive subgraph models using task-based evaluations and conducted extensive experimental studies on both synthetic and real-world networks. Thus, we unveil the characteristics of cohesive subgraph models, highlighting their efficiency and applicability. Our findings not only provide a detailed evaluation of current models but also lay the groundwork for future research by shedding light on the balance between the interpretability and cohesion of the subgraphs. This research guides the selection of suitable models for specific analytical needs and applications, providing valuable insights.

FairSNA: Algorithmic Fairness in Social Network Analysis

In recent years, designing fairness-aware methods has received much attention in various domains, including machine learning, natural language processing, and information retrieval. However, in social network analysis (SNA), designing fairness-aware methods for various research problems by considering structural bias and inequalities of large-scale social networks has not received much attention. In this work, we highlight how the structural bias of social networks impacts the fairness of different SNA methods. We further discuss fairness aspects that should be considered while proposing network structure-based solutions for different SNA problems, such as link prediction, influence maximization, centrality ranking, and community detection. This survey-cum-vision clearly highlights that very few works have considered fairness and bias while proposing solutions; even these works are mainly focused on some research topics, such as link prediction, influence maximization, and PageRank. However, fairness has not yet been addressed for other research topics, such as influence blocking and community detection. We review the state of the art for different research topics in SNA, including the considered fairness constraints, their limitations, and our vision. This survey also covers evaluation metrics, available datasets and synthetic network generating models used in such studies. Finally, we highlight various open research directions that require researchers’ attention to bridge the gap between fairness and SNA.

Fuzzy Influence Maximization in Social Networks

Influence maximization is a fundamental problem in social network analysis. This problem refers to the identification of a set of influential users as initial spreaders to maximize the spread of a message in a network. When such a message is spread, some users may be influenced by it. A common assumption of existing work is that the impact of a message is essentially binary: A user is either influenced (activated) or not influenced (non-activated). However, how strongly a user is influenced by a message may play an important role in this user’s attempt to influence subsequent users and spread the message further; existing methods may fail to model accurately the spreading process and identify influential users. In this article, we propose a novel approach to model a social network as a fuzzy graph where a fuzzy variable is used to represent the extent to which a user is influenced by a message (user’s activation level). By extending a diffusion model to simulate the spreading process in such a fuzzy graph, we conceptually formulate the fuzzy influence maximization problem for which three methods are proposed to identify influential users. Experimental results demonstrate the accuracy of the proposed methods in determining influential users in social networks.

Meta-learning adaptation network for few-shot link prediction in heterogeneous social networks

Link prediction, which aims to predict future or missing links among nodes, is a crucial research problem in social network analysis. A unique few-shot challenge is link prediction on newly emerged link types without sufficient verification information in heterogeneous social networks, such as commodity recommendation on new categories. Most of current approaches for link prediction rely heavily on sufficient verified link samples, and almost ignore the shared knowledge between different link types. Hence, they tend to suffer from data scarcity in heterogeneous social networks and fail to handle newly emerged link types where has no sufficient verified link samples. To overcome this challenge, we propose a model based on meta-learning, called the meta-learning adaptation network (MLAN), which acquires transferable knowledge from historical link types to improve the prediction performance on newly emerged link types. MLAN consists of three main components: a subtask slicer, a meta migrator, and an adaptive predictor. The subtask slicer is responsible for generating community subtasks for the link prediction on historical link types. Subsequently, the meta migrator simultaneously completes multiple community subtasks from different link types to acquire transferable subtask-shared knowledge. Finally, the adaptive predictor employs the parameters of the meta migrator to fuse the subtask-shared knowledge from different community subtasks and learn the task-specific knowledge of newly emerged link types. Experimental results conducted on real-world social media datasets prove that our proposed MLAN outperforms state-of-the-art models in few-shot link prediction in heterogeneous social networks.

Social Network Analysis: A Survey on Measure, Structure, Language Information Analysis, Privacy, and Applications

The rapid growth in popularity of online social networks provides new opportunities in computer science, sociology, math, information studies, biology, business, and more. Social network analysis (SNA) is a paramount technique supporting understanding social relationships and networks. Accordingly, certain studies and reviews have been presented focusing on information dissemination, influence analysis, link prediction, and more. However, the ultimate aim is for social network background knowledge and analysis to solve real-world social network problems. SNA still has several research challenges in this context, including users’ privacy in online social networks. Inspired by these facts, we have presented a survey on social network analysis techniques, visualization, structure, privacy, and applications. This detailed study has started with the basics of network representation, structure, and measures. Our primary focus is on SNA applications with state-of-the-art techniques. We further provide a comparative analysis of recent developments on SNA problems in the sequel. The privacy preservation with SNA is also surveyed. In the end, research challenges and future directions are discussed to suggest to researchers a starting point for their research.

A fast module identification and filtering approach for influence maximization problem in social networks

In this paper, we explore influence maximization, one of the most widely studied problems in social network analysis. However, developing an effective algorithm for influence maximization is still a challenging task given its NP-hard nature. To tackle this issue, we propose the CSP (Combined modules for Seed Processing) algorithm, which aim to identify influential nodes. In CSP, graph modules are initially identified by a combination of criteria such as the clustering coefficient, degree, and common neighbors of nodes. Nodes with the same label are then clustered together into modules using label diffusion. Subsequently, only the most influential modules are selected using a filtering method based on their diffusion capacity. The algorithm then merges neighboring modules into distinct modules and extracts a candidate set of influential nodes using a new metric to quickly select seed sets. The number of selected nodes for the candidate set is restricted by a defined limit measure. Finally, seed nodes are chosen from the candidate set using a novel node scoring measure. We evaluated the proposed algorithm on both real-world and synthetic networks, and our experimental results indicate that the CSP algorithm outperforms other competitive algorithms in terms of solution quality and speedup on tested networks.

Dynamic node influence tracking based influence maximization on dynamic social networks

Influence maximization is one of the popular problems in social network analysis. Its application includes viral marketing, epidemic control, and recommender systems. Most of the existing methods are applicable to static networks. However, many real-world networks are dynamic and they evolve with time. This paper studies influence maximization on dynamic social networks and proposes Dynamic Influence based Seed Selection (DYISSE) method. To find ‘k’ most influential nodes, the proposed method first estimates the influence of each node by introducing a Two-hop Triangular Influence (TTI) that measures the influence strength of each node by utilizing the property of triangles. Based on the TTI, a method named the Dynamic Tractable Set (D-TeSt) is proposed to track the changes in the influence of individual nodes when the topology of the network changes with time. The performance of the DYISSE method is analyzed under the LAIC model on two real-world and twelve synthetic dynamic networks. The results show that the proposed method performs better than the temporal versions of DegreeDiscount, MaxDegree, K-shell, Random, and Closeness centrality measures in extracting initial influential nodes.

LUEM : Local User Engagement Maximization in Networks

Understanding a social network is a fundamental problem in social network analysis because of its numerous applications. Recently, user engagement in networks has received extensive attention from many research groups. However, most user engagement models focus on global user engagement to maximize (or minimize) the number of engaged users. In this study, we formulate the so-called Local User Engagement Maximization (LUEM) problem. We prove that the LUEM problem is NP-hard. To obtain high-quality results, we propose an approximation algorithm that incorporates a traditional hill-climbing method. To improve efficiency, we propose an efficient pruning strategy while maintaining effectiveness. In addition, by observing the relationship between the degree and user engagement, we propose an efficient heuristic algorithm that preserves effectiveness. Finally, we conducted extensive experiments on ten real-world networks to demonstrate the superiority of the proposed algorithms. We observed that the proposed algorithm achieved up to 605% more engaged users compared to the best baseline algorithms.

A novel attributed community detection by integration of feature weighting and node centrality

Community detection is one of the primary problems in social network analysis and this problem has more challenges in attributed social networks. The purpose of community detection in attributed social networks is to discover communities with not only homogeneous node properties but also adherent structures. Although community detection has been extensively studied, attributed community detection of large social networks with a large number of attributes remains a vital challenge. To address this challenge, in this paper a novel attributed community detection method is developed by integration of feature weighting with node centrality techniques. The developed method includes two main phases: (1) Weight Matrix Calculation, (2) Label Propagation Algorithm-based Attributed Community Detection. The aim of the first phase is to calculate the weight between two linked nodes using structural and attribute similarities, while, in the second phase, an improved label propagation algorithm-based community detection method in the attributed social network is proposed. The purpose of the second phase is to detect different communities by employing the calculated weight matrix and node popularity. After implementing the proposed method, its performance is compared with several other state of the art methods using some benchmarked real-world datasets. The results indicate that the developed method outperforms several other state-of-the-art methods and ascertain the effectiveness of the developed method for attributed community detection.

MAHE-IM: Multiple Aggregation of Heterogeneous Relation Embedding for Influence Maximization on Heterogeneous Information Network

Influence maximization (IM), as an essential problem in social network analysis, can identify a minimum group of the influential nodes to maximize the spread of information on the network. The majority of IM studies focus on homogeneous networks, whereas in real world, heterogeneous networks are ubiquitous. The existing IM methods based on homogeneous networks do not consider a variety of complex heterogeneous relationships and the attribute of different types of nodes, which don’t accommodate most real scenario. It is of great significance to study IM methods based on heterogeneous networks, where efficient integrating complex multiple semantic relationships and structures embedded in the heterogeneous network is the key breakthrough point.In this paper, a novel deep learning algorithm for influence maximization on heterogeneous networks based on a multiple aggregation of heterogeneous relation embedding named MAHE-IM is proposed, which can capture the heterogeneous high-order structure and semantic features of heterogeneous information networks. For more comprehensive and systematical evaluation of MAHE-IM, we further extend fourteen state-of-the-art homogeneous and heterogeneous network embedding and graph neural network methods for IM problem and propose fourteen extented IM algorithms. Four popular IM algorithms and our extended fourteen IM algorithms are taken as eighteen baseline algorithms, which can be categorized three types: greedy-based, network embedding-based and GNN-based IM algorithms. Compared with eighteen baseline algorithms, the experimental results illustrate that MAHE-IM is significantly efficient and effective. MAHE-IM is more practical on heterogeneous networks. In addition, in order to maximize the convenience for users, a webserver (https://mahe-im.com/) is developed. The users can obtain the IM results by submitting their heterogeneous networks to the webserver. The corresponding source code and used data in this paper can also be available at https://mahe-im.com/ and https://codeocean.com/capsule/4091031/tree/v1.

TLP-CCC: Temporal Link Prediction Based on Collective Community and Centrality Feature Fusion.

In the domain of network science, the future link between nodes is a significant problem in social network analysis. Recently, temporal network link prediction has attracted many researchers due to its valuable real-world applications. However, the methods based on network structure similarity are generally limited to static networks, and the methods based on deep neural networks often have high computational costs. This paper fully mines the network structure information and time-domain attenuation information, and proposes a novel temporal link prediction method. Firstly, the network collective influence (CI) method is used to calculate the weights of nodes and edges. Then, the graph is divided into several community subgraphs by removing the weak link. Moreover, the biased random walk method is proposed, and the embedded representation vector is obtained by the modified Skip-gram model. Finally, this paper proposes a novel temporal link prediction method named TLP-CCC, which integrates collective influence, the community walk features, and the centrality features. Experimental results on nine real dynamic network data sets show that the proposed method performs better for area under curve (AUC) evaluation compared with the classical link prediction methods.

Structural Mining for Link Prediction Using Various Machine Learning Algorithms

Link prediction is an emerging research problem in social network analysis, where future possible links are predicted based on the structural or the content information associated with the network. In this paper, various machine learning (ML) techniques have been utilized for predicting the future possible links based on the features extracted from the topological structure. Moreover, feature sets have been prepared by measuring different similarity metrics between all pair of nodes between which no link exists. For predicting the future possible links various supervised ML algorithms like K-NN, MLP, bagging, SVM, decision tree have been implemented. The feature set for each instance in the dataset has been prepared by measuring the similarity index between the non-existence links. The model has been trained to identify the new links which are likely to appear in the future but currently do not exist in the network. Further, the proposed model is validated through various performance metrics.

A novel approach for efficient stance detection in online social networks with metaheuristic optimization

In the 19th and 20th centuries, social networks have been an important topic in a wide range of fields from sociology to education. However, with the advances in computer technology in the 21st century, significant changes have been observed in social networks, and conventional networks have evolved into online social networks. The size of these networks, along with the large amount of data they generate, has introduced new social networking problems and solutions. Social network analysis methods are used to understand social network data. Today, several methods are implemented to solve various social network analysis problems, albeit with limited success in certain problems. Thus, the researchers develop new methods or recommend solutions to improve the performance of the existing methods. In the present paper, a novel optimization method that aimed to classify social network analysis problems was proposed. The problem of stance detection, an online social network analysis problem, was first tackled as an optimization problem. Furthermore, a new hybrid metaheuristic optimization algorithm was proposed for the first time in the current study, and the algorithm was compared with various methods. The analysis of the findings obtained with accuracy, precision, recall, and F-measure classification metrics demonstrated that our method performed better than other methods.

Stable Community Detection in Signed Social Networks

Community detection is one of the most fundamental problems in social network analysis, while most existing research focuses on unsigned graphs. In real applications, social networks involve not only positive relationships but also negative ones. It is important to exploit the signed information to identify more stable communities. In this paper, we propose a novel model, named stable <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$k$</tex-math></inline-formula> -core, to measure the stability of a community in signed graphs. The stable <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$k$</tex-math></inline-formula> -core model not only emphasizes user engagement, but also eliminates unstable structures. We show that the problem of finding the maximum stable <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$k$</tex-math></inline-formula> -core is NP-hard. To scale for large graphs, novel pruning strategies and searching methods are proposed. We conduct extensive experiments on 6 real-world signed networks to verify the efficiency and effectiveness of proposed model and techniques.

Similarity-based link prediction in social networks using latent relationships between the users

Social network analysis has recently attracted lots of attention among researchers due to its wide applicability in capturing social interactions. Link prediction, related to the likelihood of having a link between two nodes of the network that are not connected, is a key problem in social network analysis. Many methods have been proposed to solve the problem. Among these methods, similarity-based methods exhibit good efficiency by considering the network structure and using as a fundamental criterion the number of common neighbours between two nodes to establish structural similarity. High structural similarity may suggest that a link between two nodes is likely to appear. However, as shown in the paper, the number of common neighbours may not be always sufficient to provide comprehensive information about structural similarity between a pair of nodes. To address this, a neighbourhood vector is first specified for each node. Then, a novel measure is proposed to determine the similarity of each pair of nodes based on the number of common neighbours and correlation between the neighbourhood vectors of the nodes Experimental results, on a range of different real-world networks, suggest that the proposed method results in higher accuracy than other state-of-the-art similarity-based methods for link prediction.

Link prediction based on feature representation and fusion

Link prediction is one of the core problems in social network analysis. Considering the complexity of features in social networks, we propose a link prediction method based on feature representation and fusion. Firstly, based on the sparseness and high-dimensionality of network structure, network embedding is applied to represent the network structure as low-dimensional vectors, which identifies the spatial relationships and discovers the relevance among users. Second, owing to the diversity and complexity of text semantics, the user text is converted into vectors by word embedding models. As user behaviors can reflect the dynamic change of links, a time decay function is introduced to process the text vector to quantify the impact of user text on link establishment. Meanwhile, to simplify the complexity, we choose the top-k relevant users for each user. Finally, due to the attention mechanism can improve the expression of user’s interests in text information, a link prediction method with attention-based convolutional neural network is proposed. By fusing and mining structural and text features, the purpose of synthetically predict link is finally achieved. Experimental results show that the proposed model can effectively improve the performance of link prediction.

An LSTM Model for Predicting Cross-Platform Bursts of Social Media Activity

Burst analysis and prediction is a fundamental problem in social network analysis, since user activities have been shown to have an intrinsically bursty nature. Bursts may also be a signal of topics that are of growing real-world interest. Since bursts can be caused by exogenous phenomena and are indicative of burgeoning popularity, leveraging cross platform social media data may be valuable for predicting bursts within a single social media platform. A Long-Short-Term-Memory (LSTM) model is proposed in order to capture the temporal dependencies and associations based upon activity information. The data used to test the model was collected from Twitter, Github, and Reddit. Our results show that the LSTM based model is able to leverage the complex cross-platform dynamics to predict bursts. In situations where information gathering from platforms of concern is not possible the learned model can provide a prediction for whether bursts on another platform can be expected.

Sentiment classification within online social media using whale optimization algorithm and social impact theory based optimization

In recent years, social networks have become an important part of daily life and are becoming increasingly important. In this study, sentiment analysis or opinion mining, which is one of the most well-known social network analysis problems, is considered as an optimization problem for the first time. In the same way, for the first time, sentiment analysis is considered as a multi-objective problem. Whale Optimization Algorithm and Social Impact Theory based Optimization Algorithm, which are the current intelligent optimization algorithms, are adapted for the sentiment analysis problem. Furthermore, memory feature is integrated into Social Impact Theory based Optimization Algorithm in order to obtain effective results in this study. The obtained results from the proposed algorithms are also compared with thirty-three supervised learning algorithms within real IMDB, Polarity, and Amazon data sets. In order to evaluate the performance of the results; accuracy percentage, precision, recall, F-Measure, and MCC that are the five most commonly used measure in the literature are used. When the results are examined, it is observed that adapted metaheuristic optimization algorithms give more successful results in sentiment analysis problem.

Homophily Preserving Community Detection.

As a fundamental problem in social network analysis, community detection has recently attracted wide attention, accompanied by the output of numerous community detection methods. However, most existing methods are developed by only exploiting link topology, without taking node homophily (i.e., node similarity) into consideration. Thus, much useful information that can be utilized to improve the quality of detected communities is ignored. To overcome this limitation, we propose a new community detection approach based on nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF), namely, homophily preserving NMF (HPNMF), which models not only link topology but also node homophily of networks. As such, HPNMF is able to better reflect the inherent properties of community structure. In order to capture node homophily from scratch, we provide three similarity measurements that naturally reveal the association relationships between nodes. We further present an efficient learning algorithm with convergence guarantee to solve the proposed model. Finally, extensive experiments are conducted, and the results demonstrate that HPNMF has strong ability to outperform the state-of-the-art baseline methods.