title: Sequential detection of temporal communities by estrangement confinement.
abstract: Temporal communities are the result of a consistent partitioning of nodes across multiple snapshots of an evolving network, and they provide insights into how dense clusters in a network emerge, combine, split and decay over time. To reliably detect temporal communities we need to not only find a good community partition in a given snapshot but also ensure that it bears some similarity to the partition(s) found in the previous snapshot(s), a particularly difficult task given the extreme sensitivity of community structure yielded by current methods to changes in the network structure. Here, motivated by the inertia of inter-node relationships, we present a new measure of partition distance called estrangement, and show that constraining estrangement enables one to find meaningful temporal communities at various degrees of temporal smoothness in diverse real-world datasets. Estrangement confinement thus provides a principled approach to uncovering temporal communities in evolving networks.
authors.affiliation: Raytheon BBN Technologies, Cambridge MA 02138, USA. vkawadia@bbn.com
authors.forename: Vikas
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Kawadia
authors.forename: Sameet
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Sreenivasan
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D008433:Mathematics; D055585:Physical Phenomena; D012984:Software; D013816:Thermodynamics