A game-theoretic framework to identify overlapping communities in social networks

13 years 4 months ago

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In this paper, we introduce a game-theoretic framework to address the community detection problem based on the structures of social networks. We formulate the dynamics of community formation as a strategic game called community formation game: Given an underlying social graph, we assume that each node is a selfish agent who selects communities to join or leave based on her own utility measurement. A community structure can be interpreted as an equilibrium of this game. We formulate the agents' utility by the combination of a gain function and a loss function. We allow each agents to select multiple communities, which naturally captures the concept of "overlapping communities". We propose a gain function based on the modularity concept introduced by Newman (2006), and a simple loss function that reflects the intrinsic costs incurred when people join the communities. We conduct extensive experiments under this framework, and our results show that our algorithm is effective...

Wei Chen, Zhenming Liu, Xiaorui Sun, Yajun Wang

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