Discovering Interesting Subgraphs in Social Media Networks

Social media data are often modeled as heterogeneous graphs with multiple types of nodes and edges. We present a discovery algorithm that first chooses a "background" graph based on a user's analytical interest and then automatically discovers subgraphs that are structurally and content-wise distinctly different from the background graph. The technique combines the notion of a group-by operation on a graph and the notion of subjective interestingness, resulting in an automated discovery of interesting subgraphs. Our experiments on a socio-political database show the effectiveness of our technique.