Title: Towards multi-ego-centred communities: a node similarity approach

Authors: Maximilien Danisch; Jean-Loup Guillaume; Bénédicte Le Grand

Addresses: Laboratoire d'Informatique de Paris 6, Université Pierre et Marie Curie, 4 Place Jussieu, 75005 Paris, France ' Laboratoire d'Informatique de Paris 6, Université Pierre et Marie Curie, 4 Place Jussieu, 75005 Paris, France ' Centre de Recherche en Informatique, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, 90 rue de Tolbiac, 75013 Paris, France

Abstract: In this paper, we investigate the notion of ego-centred community structure, i.e., the community structure around a given node. We propose a new similarity measure between nodes based on opinion dynamics to study such a structure. We call it the carryover opinion. In addition to be parameter-free, the carryover opinion can be calculated in a very time-efficient way and can thus be used in very large graphs. We also go further in the idea of ego-centred communities by introducing the new concept of multi-ego-centred communities, i.e., focusing on the communities around a set of nodes rather than around a single node. A key idea is that, although one node generally belongs to numerous communities, a small set of appropriate nodes can fully characterise a single community.

Keywords: ego-centred communities; multi-ego-centred communities; carryover opinion; local communities; overlapping communities; metric on nodes; node similarity; node proximity; opinion dynamics; social networks; online communities; web based communities; virtual communities.

DOI: 10.1504/IJWBC.2013.054906

International Journal of Web Based Communities, 2013 Vol.9 No.3, pp.299 - 322

Published online: 30 Jan 2014 *

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