A Novel Trust Model Based Overlapping Community Detection Algorithm for Social Networks

Abstract

With the fast advances in Internet technologies, social networks have become a major platform for social interaction, lifestyle demonstration, and message dissemination. Effective community detection in social networks helps to assess public sentiment, identify community leaders, and produce personalized recommendation. While different community detection approaches have been proposed in the literature, the trust model based detection schemes model user interactions as trust transfer, which helps to capture the implicit relation in the network. Unfortunately, trust model based detection schemes face a <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">cold start</i> problem, i.e., they cannot accurately model newly joined users as these users have few interactions for a duration after joining the network. In this paper, we propose TLCDA, a novel trust model based community detection algorithm. By enhancing the traditional trust computation with inter-node relation strength and similarity in social networks, TLCDA detects communities through coarse-grained K-Mediods clustering. Our evaluation on real social networks shows that the communities detected by TLCDA exhibit superior preference cohesion while satisfying the topology cohesion.