Information Extraction from Large Multi-layer Social Networks

Brandon Oselio, Alex Kulesza, Alfred O. Hero III

Abstract

Social networks often encode community structure using multiple distinct types of links between nodes. In this paper we introduce a novel method to extract information from such multi-layer networks, where each type of link forms its own layer. Using the concept of Pareto optimality, community detection in this multi-layer setting is formulated as a multiple criterion optimization problem. We propose an algorithm for finding an approximate Pareto frontier containing a family of solutions. The power of this approach is demonstrated on a Twitter dataset, where the nodes are hashtags and the layers correspond to (1) behavioral edges connecting pairs of hash- tags whose temporal profiles are similar and (2) relational edges connecting pairs of hashtags that appear in the same tweets.