Identifying communities by influence dynamics in social networks

Communities are not static; they evolve, split and merge, appear and disappear, i.e., they are the product of dynamical processes that govern the evolution of a network. A good algorithm for community detection should not only quantify the topology of the network but incorporate the dynamical processes that take place on the network. We present an algorithm for community detection that combines network structure with processes that support the creation and/or evolution of communities. The algorithm does not embrace the universal approach but instead tries to focus on social networks and model dynamic social interactions that occur on those networks. It identifies leaders and communities that form around those leaders. It naturally supports overlapping communities by associating each node with a membership vector that describes the node's involvement in each community. This way, in addition to the overlapping communities, we can identify nodes that are good followers of their leader and also nodes with no clear community involvement that serve as proxies between several communities and that are equally as important. We run the algorithm for several real social networks which we believe represent a good fraction of the wide body of social networks and discuss the results, including other possible applications.