Behavior-based indices for evaluating communities in online social networks

• Published in: Intelligent data analysis 2017-01, Vol.21 (1), p.205-220
• Main Authors: Karimi-Majd, Amir-Mohsen, Fathian, Mohammad, Gholamian, Mohammad-Reza
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Communities; Network reliability; Social networks
• ISSN: 1088-467X; 1571-4128
• DOI: 10.3233/IDA-150349

Online Social Network (OSN) users generate massive amounts of information by their online interactions, by publishing profiles and posting content. Detection and analysis of the dense sub-structures of networks, called communities could facilitate a comprehensive understanding of OSNs. This presents the challenge of formulating appropriate means to evaluate and validate each detected community. Most researchers have tackled this issue by comparing results obtained from community detection algorithms with information on available social grouping as a ground-truth. However, social grouping does not guarantee formation or existence of an experienced sense of community, based on the community-oriented behavior patterns of its users. This study presents a new scoring function that targets the behavior of nodes in order to validate detected communities. Indeed, we employ this function as a Cluster Validity Index (CVI) for evaluating detected communities. Then, performance of the proposed CVI was compared with other known functions by ranking in terms of several goodness metrics, on a variety of homogeneous networks. This study also presents an enhanced version of the CVI to evaluate communities efficiently in heterogeneous networks. A number of experiments have been provided to demonstrate the effectiveness and reliability of the proposed CVI for heterogeneous networks.