Influence based Analysis of Community Consistency in Dynamic Networks

The development of Internet and social networks has provided more emerging network data which facilitates the dynamic network analysis. In this paper, we propose a new method to measure coherence strength, also referred to as community consistency, of a community under dynamic settings. In order to better interpret the influence of evolving community structure on community consistency, we model the problem as one of influence propagation processes having a causal relation with the community consistency. To this effect a generative model is proposed to combine the influence propagation and the network topological structure at each time stamp. Our comprehensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed framework in estimating the community consistency.