Mining hidden community in heterogeneous social networks

Social network analysis has attracted much attention in recent years. Community mining is one of the major directions in social network analysis. Most of the existing methods on community mining assume that there is only one kind of relation in the network, and moreover, the mining results are independent of the users' needs or preferences. However, in reality, there exist multiple, heterogeneous social networks, each representing a particular kind of relationship, and each kind of relationship may play a distinct role in a particular task. Thus mining networks by assuming only one kind of relation may miss a lot of valuable hidden community information and may not be adaptable to the diverse information needs from different users.In this paper, we systematically analyze the problem of mining hidden communities on heterogeneous social networks. Based on the observation that different relations have different importance with respect to a certain query, we propose a new method for learning an optimal linear combination of these relations which can best meet the user's expectation. With the obtained relation, better performance can be achieved for community mining. Our approach to social network analysis and community mining represents a major shift in methodology from the traditional one, a shift from single-network, user-independent analysis to multi-network, user-dependant, and query-based analysis. Experimental results on Iris data set and DBLP data set demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.