Communities from seed sets

Expanding a seed set into a larger community is a common procedure in link-based analysis. We show how to adapt recent results from theoretical computer science to expand a seed set into a community with small conductance and a strong relationship to the seed, while examining only a small neighborhood of the entire graph. We extend existing results to give theoretical guarantees that apply to a variety of seed sets from specified communities. We also describe simple and flexible heuristics for applying these methods in practice, and present early experiments showing that these methods compare favorably with existing approaches. Categories and Subject Descriptors G.2.2 [Discrete Mathematics]: Graph Theory--Network Problems; H.3.3 [Information Systems]: Information Search and Retrieval--clustering General Terms Algorithms, Theory, Experimentation Keywords community finding, link analysis, graph conductance, random walks, seed sets

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: WWW
• Authors: Reid Andersen, Kevin J. Lang
• Keywords: Graph Conductance, Internet Technology, Seed Sets, Small Conductance, WWW 2006