COEUS: Community detection via seed-set expansion on graph streams

We examine the problem of effective identification of community structure of a network whose elements and their respective relationships manifest through streams. The problem has recently garnered much interest as it appears in emerging computational environments and concerns critical applications in diverse areas including social computing, web analysis, IoT and biology. Despite the already expended research efforts in detecting communities in networks, the unprecedented volume that real-world networks now reach, renders the task of revealing community structures extremely burdensome. The sheer size of such networks oftentimes makes their representation in main memory impossible. Thus, processing the developing graphs to extract the underlying communities remains an open challenge. In this paper, we propose a graph-stream community detection algorithm that expands seed-sets of nodes to communities. We consider a stream of edges and aim at processing them to form communities without maintaining the entire graph structure. Instead, we maintain very limited information regarding the nodes of the graph and the communities we seek. In addition to our novel streaming approach, we both develop a technique that increases the accuracy of our algorithm considerably and propose a new clustering algorithm that allows for automatically deriving the size of the communities we seek to detect. Our experimental evaluation using ground-truth communities for a wide range of large real-word networks shows that our proposed approach does achieve accuracy comparable or even better to that of state-of-the-art non-streaming community detection algorithms. More importantly, the attained improvements in both execution time and memory space requirements are remarkable.