Logo image
Detecting communities and their evolutions in dynamic social networks—a Bayesian approach
Journal article   Open access   Peer reviewed

Detecting communities and their evolutions in dynamic social networks—a Bayesian approach

Tianbao Yang, Yun Chi, Shenghuo Zhu, Yihong Gong and Rong Jin
Machine learning, Vol.82(2), pp.157-189
09/25/2010
DOI: 10.1007/s10994-010-5214-7
url
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10994-010-5214-7View
Published (Version of record) Open Access

Abstract

Although a large body of work is devoted to finding communities in static social networks, only a few studies examined the dynamics of communities in evolving social networks. In this paper, we propose a dynamic stochastic block model for finding communities and their evolution in a dynamic social network. The proposed model captures the evolution of communities by explicitly modeling the transition of community memberships for individual nodes in the network. Unlike many existing approaches for modeling social networks that estimate parameters by their most likely values (i.e., point estimation), in this study, we employ a Bayesian treatment for parameter estimation that computes the posterior distributions for all the unknown parameters. This Bayesian treatment allows us to capture the uncertainty in parameter values and therefore is more robust to data noise than point estimation. In addition, an efficient algorithm is developed for Bayesian inference to handle large sparse social networks. Extensive experimental studies based on both synthetic data and real-life data demonstrate that our model achieves higher accuracy and reveals more insights in the data than several state-of-the-art algorithms.
Article Artificial Intelligence Computer Science Control Mechatronics Natural Language Processing (NLP) Robotics Simulation and Modeling

Details

Metrics

Logo image