Social Network Analysis and Mining

Abstract

Online social networks are web platforms that reflect the social networking structures of the real world, such as friendship, professional, family, and other networks. In recent years, the study of social networks has attracted the attention of the scientific community for its variety of applications such as: friendship, locations, and products recommendation systems, travel planning systems, and social cataloging, which allows users organize their collections (books, music, places visited, among others) as they interact with others and write down their impressions and recommendations. Some of these networks contains geolocation information of users which allow a wider range of applications. Given the dynamic and temporal nature, heterogeneous and eventually georeferenced social networks, there are different problems to be faced. This project addresses the following issues 1) formation of new relationships between users; 2) detection of communities and 3) behavioral analysis of group of users. The project relates to two doctoral projects and one MSc research, all in progress. It is observed that most of the research in social networks addresses only the analysis of the information related to the pair of user or their neighborhood, that is the local information. We expect this project to investigate in depth how the behavior of groups of users, and additional data such as geolocation and time in heterogeneous networks impact the problem of creating new relationships and dynamics of social networks. (AU)