Community evolution detection in dynamic heterogeneous information networks

As the rapid development of all kinds of online databases, huge heterogeneous information networks thus derived are ubiquitous. Detecting evolutionary communities in these networks can help people better understand the structural evolution of the networks. However, most of the current community evolution analysis is based on the homogeneous networks, while a real community usually involves different types of objects in a heterogeneous network. For example, when referring to a research community, it contains a set of authors, a set of conferences or journals and a set of terms. In this paper, we study the problem of detecting evolutionary multi-typed communities defined as net-clusters in dynamic heterogeneous networks. A Dirichlet Process Mixture Model-based generative model is proposed to model the community generations. At each time stamp, a clustering of communities with the best cluster number that can best explain the current and historical networks are automatically detected. A Gibbs sampling-based inference algorithm is provided to inference the model. Also, the evolution structure can be read from the model, which can help users better understand the birth, split and death of communities. Experiments on two real datasets, namely DBLP and Delicious.com, have shown the effectiveness of the algorithm.