Title
On the network you keep: analyzing persons of interest using Cliqster
Abstract
Our goal is to determine the structural differences between different categories of networks and to use these differences to predict the network category. Existing work on this topic has looked at social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, co-author networks, etc. We, instead, focus on a novel dataset that we have assembled from a variety of sources, including law enforcement agencies, financial institutions, commercial database providers and other similar organizations. The dataset comprises networks of persons of interest with each network belonging to different categories such as suspected terrorists, convicted individuals, etc. We demonstrate that such “anti-social” networks are qualitatively different from the usual social networks and that new techniques are required to identify and learn features of such networks for the purposes of prediction and classification. We propose Cliqster, a new generative Bernoulli process-based model for unweighted networks. The generating probabilities are the result of a decomposition which reflects a network’s community structure. Using a maximum likelihood solution for the network inference leads to a least squares problem. By solving this problem, we are able to present an efficient algorithm for transforming the network to a new space which is both concise and discriminative. This new space preserves the identity of the network as much as possible. Our algorithm is interpretable and intuitive. Finally, by comparing our research against the baseline method (SVD) and against a state-of-the-art Graphlet algorithm, we show the strength of our algorithm in discriminating between different categories of networks.
Year
DOI
Venue
2015
10.1007/s13278-015-0302-0
ASONAM '14: Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining 2014 Beijing China August, 2014
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Social network analysis, Persons of interest, Community structure
Journal
abs/1510.01374
Issue
ISSN
ISBN
1
1869-5469
978-1-4799-5876-4
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
2
0.36
15
Authors
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Saber Shokat Fadaee121.03
Mehrdad Farajtabar223020.70
Ravi Sundaram376272.13
Javed A. Aslam42744237.76
Nikos I. Passas591.68