DUKE: A Solution for Discovering Neighborhood Patterns in Ego Networks

Abstract

Given the rapid growth of social media websites and the ease of aggregating ever-richer social data, an inevitable research question that can be expected to emerge is whether different interaction patterns of individuals and their meaningful interpretation can be captured for social network analysis. In this work, we present a novel solution that discovers occurrences of prototypical 'ego network' patterns from social media and mobile-phone networks, to provide a data-driven instrument to be used in behavioral sciences for graph interpretations. We analyze nine datasets gathered from social media websites and mobile phones, together with 13 network measures, and three unsupervised clustering algorithms. Further, we use an unsupervised feature similarity technique to reduce redundancy and extract compact features from the data. The reduced feature subsets are then used to discover ego patterns using various clustering techniques. By cluster analysis, we discover that eight distinct ego neighborhood patterns or ego graphs have emerged. This categorization allows concise analysis of users' data as they change over time. We provide fine-grained analysis for the validity and quality of clustering results. We perform clustering verification based on the following three intuitions: i) analyzing the clustering patterns for the same set of users crawled from three social media networks, ii) associating metadata information with the clusters and evaluating their performance on real networks, iii) studying selected participants over an extended period to analyze their behavior.