Tracking Community Consistency in Dynamic Networks: An Influence-based Approach

The dynamic network data have become ubiquitous with the rapid development of Internet and smart devices. To effectively manage the involved vertices in networks, it is crucial to track the special community patterns and analyze the relationships among vertices. In this paper, we propose a new method to measure the coherence strength, also referred to as community consistency, of a community over a specific observation period. The measurement of community consistency is especially challenging given the dynamic community structure over time, i.e., vertices can leave their original communities and join new communities. In order to interpret the causes of evolving community structure and model the influence of evolving community structure on community consistency, we introduce an influence propagation process having a causal relation with the community consistency. Specifically, a generative model is proposed to combine the influence propagation and the network topological structure at each time step. The proposed influence-based approach for modeling evolution can be instantiated in a variety of real-world network data. The comprehensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed framework in estimating the community consistency. Besides, we conduct a case study to show the effectiveness of the proposed method in real-world applications.