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Remodeling the network for microgroup detection on microblog

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Abstract

In this paper, we focus on the problem of community detection on Sina weibo, the most popular microblogging system in China. By characterizing the structure and content of microgroup (community) on Sina weibo in detail, we observe that different from ordinary social networks, the degree assortativity coefficients are negative on most microgroups. In addition, we find that users from the same microgroup tend to share some common attributes (e.g., followers, tags) and interests extracted from their published posts. Inspired by these new findings, we propose a united method to remodel the network for microgroup detection while maintaining the information of link structure and user content. Firstly, the link direction is concerned by assigning greater weight values to more surprising links, while the content similarity is measured by the Jaccard coefficient of common features and interest similarity based on Latent Dirichlet Allocation model. Then, both link direction and content similarity between two users are uniformly converted to the edge weight of a new remodeled network, which is undirected and weighted. Finally, multiple frequently used community detection algorithms that support weighted networks could be employed. Extensive experiments on real-world social networks show that both link structure and user content play almost equally important roles in microgroup detection on Sina weibo. Our method outperforms the traditional methods with average accuracy improvement up to 39 %, and the number of unrecognized users decreased by about 75 %.

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Acknowledgments

We thank anonymous reviewers for their useful comments and suggestions. This work was partially supported by the fund of open project from the State Key Lab of Software Development Environment, China (No. SKLSDE-2011KF-06), the National High Technology Research and Development Program of China (863 Program) (No. 2012AA011005), and the State Key Laboratory of Mathematical Engineering and Advanced Computing, China. Part of this research was done when the first author visited the State Key Lab of Software Development Environment, Beihang University, China. We would like to thank Dr. Jichang Zhao, Dr. Xu Feng, and Dr. Xiao Liang for their encouragement and support.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Mathematical Engineering and Advanced Computing, Zhengzhou, China

    Xiaobing Xiong, Gang Zhou & Yongzhong Huang

  2. State Key Laboratory of Software Development Environment, Beihang University, Beijing, China

    Xiaobing Xiong, Xiang Niu & Ke Xu

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  1. Xiaobing Xiong
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  2. Gang Zhou
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  3. Xiang Niu
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  4. Yongzhong Huang
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  5. Ke Xu
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Correspondence to Xiaobing Xiong or Ke Xu.

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Xiong, X., Zhou, G., Niu, X. et al. Remodeling the network for microgroup detection on microblog. Knowl Inf Syst 39, 643–665 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10115-013-0626-x

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