Title
Joint Community and Structural Hole Spanner Detection via Harmonic Modularity
Abstract
Detecting communities (or modular structures) and structural hole spanners, the nodes bridging different communities in a network, are two essential tasks in the realm of network analytics. Due to the topological nature of communities and structural hole spanners, these two tasks are naturally tangled with each other, while there has been little synergy between them. In this paper, we propose a novel harmonic modularity method to tackle both tasks simultaneously. Specifically, we apply a harmonic function to measure the smoothness of community structure and to obtain the community indicator. We then investigate the sparsity level of the interactions between communities, with particular emphasis on the nodes connecting to multiple communities, to discriminate the indicator of SH spanners and assist the community guidance. Extensive experiments on real-world networks demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms several state-of-the-art methods in the community detection task and also in the SH spanner identification task (even the methods that require the supervised community information). Furthermore, by removing the SH spanners spotted by our method, we show that the quality of other community detection methods can be further improved.
Year
DOI
Venue
2016
10.1145/2939672.2939807
KDD
Keywords
Field
DocType
Community detection,structural hole,harmonic function,modularity,social network
Data mining,Community structure,Harmonic function,Modularity (networks),Social network,Computer science,Bridging (networking),Artificial intelligence,Modular design,Spanner,Modularity,Machine learning
Conference
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
18
0.80
19
Authors
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Lifang He136932.74
Chun-Ta Lu218315.10
Jiaqi Ma3886.86
Jianping Cao4544.89
Linlin Shen5135190.25
Philip S. Yu6306703474.16