Abstract Communities can intuitively be defined as subsets of nodes of a graph with a dense structure in the corresponding subgraph. However, for mining such communities usually only structural aspects are taken into account. Typically, no concise nor easily interpretable community description is provided. For tackling this issue, this paper focuses on description-oriented community detection using subgroup discovery. In order to provide both structurally valid and interpretable communities we utilize the graph structure as well as additional descriptive features of the graph’s nodes. A descriptive community pattern built upon these features then describes and identifies a community, i.e., a set of nodes, and vice versa. Essentially, we mine patterns in the “description space” characterizing interesting sets of nodes (i.e., subgroups) in the “graph space”; the interestingness of a community is evaluated by a selectable quality measure. We aim at identifying communities according to standard community quality measures, while providing characteristic descriptions of these communities at the same time. For this task, we propose several optimistic estimates of standard community quality functions to be used for efficient pruning of the search space in an exhaustive branch-and-bound algorithm. We demonstrate our approach in an evaluation using five real-world data sets, obtained from three different social media applications.
