Methods for MiningWeb Communities: Bibliometric, Spectral, and Flow

In this chapter, we examine the problem of Web community identification expressed in terms of the graph or network structure induced by the Web. While the task of community identification is obviously related to the more fundamental problems of graph partitioning and clustering, the basic task is differentiated from other problems by being within the Web domain. This single difference has many implications for how effective methods work, both in theory and in practice. In order of presentation, we will examine bibliometric similarity measures, bipartite community cores, the HITS algorithm, PageRank, and maximum flow-based Web communities. Interestingly, each of these topics relate to one-another in a non-trivial manner.