Analysis of Communities of Interest in Data Networks

Abstract. Communities of interest (COI) have been applied in a variety of environments ranging from characterizing the online buying behavior of individuals to detecting fraud in telephone networks. The common thread among these applications is that the historical COI of an individual can be used to predict future behavior as well as the behavior of other members of the COI. It would clearly be beneficial if COIs can be used in the same manner to characterize and predict the behavior of hosts within a data network. In this paper, we introduce a methodology for evaluating various aspects of COIs of hosts within an IP network. In the context of this study, we broadly define a COI as a collection of interacting hosts. We apply our methodology using data collected from a large enterprise network over a eleven week period. First, we study the distributions and stability of the size of COIs. Second, we evaluate multiple heuristics to determine a stable core set of COIs and determine the st...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: PAM
• Authors: William Aiello, Charles R. Kalmanek, Patrick Drew McDaniel, Subhabrata Sen, Oliver Spatscheck, Jacobus E. van der Merwe
• Keywords: Behavior, Computer Networks, Historical Coi, Online Buying Behavior, PAM 2005