Community Discovery in Social Networks via Heterogeneous Link Association and Fusion

Discovering social communities of web users through clustering analysis of heterogeneous link associations has drawn much attention. However, existing approaches typically require the number of clusters a prior, do not address the weighting problem for fusing heterogeneous types of links and have a heavy computational cost. In this paper, we explore the feasibility of a newly proposed heterogeneous data clustering algorithm, called Generalized Heterogeneous Fusion Adaptive Resonance Theory (GHF-ART), for discovering communities in heterogeneous social networks. Different from existing algorithms, GHF-ART performs real-time matching of patterns and one-pass learning which guarantee its low computational cost. With a vigilance parameter to restrain the intra-cluster similarity, GHF-ART does not need the number of clusters a prior. To achieve a better fusion of multiple types of links, GHF-ART employs a weighting function to incrementally assess the importance of all the feature channels. Extensive experiments have been conducted to analyze the performance of GHF-ART on two heterogeneous social network data sets and the promising results comparing with existing methods demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of GHF-ART.