Robust Detection of Link Communities with Summary Description in Social Networks

Community detection has been extensively studied for various applications. Recent research has started to explore node contents to identify semantically meaningful communities. However, links in real networks typically have semantic descriptions and communities of links can better characterize community behaviors than communities of nodes. The second issue in community finding is that the most existing methods assume network topologies and descriptive contents carry the same or compatible information of node group membership, restricting them to one topic per community, which is generally violated in real networks. The third issue is that the existing methods use top ranked words or phrases to label topics when interpreting communities, which is often inadequate for comprehension. To address these issues altogether, we propose a new Bayesian probabilistic approach for modeling real networks and developing an efficient variational algorithm for model inference. Our new method explores the intrinsic correlation between communities and topics to discover link communities and extract semantically meaningful community summaries at the same time. If desired, it is able to derive more than one topical summary per community to provide rich explanations. We present experimental results to show the effectiveness of our new approach and evaluate the method by a case study.