Node Centric Community Detection and Evolutional Prediction in Dynamic Networks

Advances in technology have led to the availability of data from different platforms such as the web and social media platforms. Much of this data can be represented in the form of a network consisting of a set of nodes connected by edges. The nodes represent the items in the networks while the edges represent the interactions between the nodes. Community detection methods have been used extensively in analyzing these networks. However, community detection in evolving networks has been a significant challenge because of the frequent changes to the networks and the need for real-time analysis. Using Static community detection methods for analyzing dynamic networks will not be appropriate because static methods do not retain a network’s history and cannot provide real-time information about the communities in the network.

Existing incremental methods treat changes to the network as a sequence of edge additions and/or removals; however, in many real-world networks, changes occur when a node is added with all its edges connecting simultaneously. 

For efficient processing of such large networks in a timely manner, there is a need for an adaptive analytical method that can process large networks without recomputing the entire network after its evolution and treat all the edges involved with a node equally. 

We proposed a node-centric community detection method that incrementally updates the community structure in the network using the already known structure of the network to avoid recomputing the entire network from the scratch and consequently achieve a high-quality community structure. The results from our experiments suggest that our approach is efficient for incremental community detection of node-centric evolving networks.