Minimal implications base for social network analysis

Purpose Currently, social network (SN) analysis is focused on the discovery of activity and social relationship patterns. Usually, these relationships are not easily and completely observed, so, it is relevant to discover substructures and potential behavior patterns in SN. Recently the formal concept analysis (FCA) has been applied for this purpose. The FCA is a concept analysis theory which identifies concept structures within a data set. The representation of SN patterns through implication rules based on FCA enables to identify relevant substructures that cannot be easily identified. Our approach considers a minimum and irreducible set of implication rules (stem base) to represent the complete set of data (activity in the network). Applying it to a social network is of interest because it can represent all the relationships using a reduced form. Design/methodology/approach Our approach permits to analyze two-mode networks by transforming the access activities of social network into a formal context. F...