Mutual Community Detection across Multiple Partially Aligned Social Networks

Community detection in online social networks has been a hot research topic in recent years. Meanwhile, to enjoy more social network services, users nowadays are usually involved in multiple online social networks simultaneously, some of which can share common information and structures. Networks that involve some common users are named as multiple “partially aligned networks”. In this paper, we want to detect communities of multiple partially aligned networks simultaneously, which is formally defined as the “Mutual Clustering” problem. The “Mutual Clustering” problem is very challenging as it has two important issues to address: (1) how to preserve the network characteristics in mutual community detection? and (2) how to utilize the information in other aligned networks to refine and disambiguate the community structures of the shared users? To solve these two challenges, a novel community detection method, MCD (Mutual Community Detector), is proposed in this paper. MCD can detect social community structures of users in multiple partially aligned networks at the same time with full considerations of (1) characteristics of each network, and (2) information of the shared users across aligned networks. Extensive experiments conducted on two real-world partially aligned heterogeneous social networks demonstrate that MCD can solve the “Mutual Clustering” problem very well.