Clustering online social network communities using genetic algorithms

Abstract

To analyze the activities in an Online Social network (OSN), we introduce the concept of "Node of Attraction" (NoA) which represents the most active node in a network community. This NoA is identified as the origin/initiator of a post/communication which attracted other nodes and formed a cluster at any point in time. In this research, a genetic algorithm (GA) is used as a data mining method where the main objective is to determine clusters of network communities in a given OSN dataset. This approach is efficient in handling different type of discussion topics in our studied OSN - comments, emails, chat expressions, etc. and can form clusters according to one or more topics. We believe that this work can be useful in finding the source for spread of this GA-based clustering of online interactions and reports some results of experiments with real-world data and demonstrates the performance of proposed approach.