Publications
Node roles and community structure in networks
Scripps, J.; Tan, P.-N. & Esfahanian, A.-H.
, 'Proceedings of the 9th WebKDD and 1st SNA-KDD 2007 workshop on Web mining and social network analysis', WebKDD/SNA-KDD '07, ACM, New York, NY, USA, [http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1348549.1348553], 26-35 (2007) [pdf]
A node role is a subjective characterization of the part it plays in a network structure. Knowing the role of a node is important for many link mining applications. For example, in Web search, nodes that are deemed to be authorities on a given topic are often found to be most relevant to the user's queries. There are a number of metrics that can be used to assign roles to individual nodes in a network, including degree, closeness, and betweenness. None of these metrics, however, take into account the community structure that underlies the network. In this paper we define community-based roles that the nodes can assume (ambassadors, big fish, loners, and bridges) and show how existing link mining techniques can be improved by knowledge of such roles. A new community-based metric is introduced for estimating the number of communities linked to a node. Using this metric and a modification of degree, we show how to assign community-based roles to the nodes. We also illustrate the benefits of knowing the community-based node roles in the context of link-based classification and influence maximization.