Community Detection in Dynamic Social Networks

Abstract

There are many community detection algorithms for discovering communities in networks, but very few deal with networks that change structure. The SCAN (Structural Clustering Algorithm for Networks) algorithm is one of these algorithms that detect communities in static networks. To make SCAN more effective for the dynamic social networks that are continually changing their structure, we propose the algorithm DSCAN (Dynamic SCAN) which improves SCAN to allow it to update a local structure in less time than it would to run SCAN on the entire network. We also improve SCAN by removing the need for parameter tuning. DSCAN, tested on real world dynamic networks, performs faster and comparably to SCAN from one timestamp to another, relative to the size of the change. We also devised an approach to genetic algorithms for detecting communities in dynamic social networks, which performs well in speed and modularity.