Group formation in large social networks: membership, growth, and evolution

The processes by which communities come together, attract new members, and develop over time is a central research issue in the social sciences -- political movements, professional organizations, and religious denominations all provide fundamental examples of such communities. In the digital domain, on-line groups are becoming increasingly prominent due to the growth of community and social networking sites such as MySpace and LiveJournal. However, the challenge of collecting and analyzing large-scale timeresolved data on social groups and communities has left most basic questions about the evolution of such groups largely unresolved: what are the structural features that influence whether individuals will join communities, which communities will grow rapidly, and how do the overlaps among pairs of communities change over time? Here we address these questions using two large sources of data: friendship links and community membership on LiveJournal, and co-authorship and conference pub...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: KDD
• Authors: Lars Backstrom, Daniel P. Huttenlocher, Jon M. Kleinberg, Xiangyang Lan
• Keywords: Data Mining, Explicit User-defined Communities, KDD 2006, Social Networking Sites, Social Sciences