Community Detection Based on Individual Topics and Network Topology in Social Networks

Detecting community structures is an important research topic in social network analysis. Unfortunately, the fundamental factors that drive the generation of social networks (i.e., the network topology and content) and community structures have not been well investigated. In this paper, according to the natural characteristics of social networks, we reveal that individual topics play a core role in community generation. If two individuals are in the same community and are interested in similar topics, it is more likely that a link will form between them. Otherwise, the probability of generating a link depends on the relationships between their communities and the topics they talk about. Based on the above observations, a novel generative community detection model is proposed that simulates the generation of the network topology and network content by considering individual topics. Moreover, our model utilizes a topic model to generate network content. The model is evaluated on two real-world datasets. The experimental results show that the community detection results outperform all the state-of-the-art baselines. In addition to accurate community detection results, we identify each individual topic distribution and the most popular users corresponding to different topics in each community.