Social-Based Conceptual Links: Conceptual Analysis Applied to Social Networks

In this work, we propose a novel approach for the discovery of frequent patterns in a social network on the basis of both vertex attributes and link frequency. With an analogy to the traditional task of mining frequent itemsets, we show that the issue addressed can be formulated in terms of a conceptual analysis that elicits conceptual links. A social-based conceptual link is a synthetic representation of a set of links between groups of vertexes that share similar internal properties. We propose a first algorithm that optimizes the search into the concept lattice of conceptual links and extracts maximal frequent conceptual links. We study the performances of our solution and give experimental results obtained on a sample example. Finally we show that the set of conceptual links extracted provides a conceptual view of the social network.