Research Thrust

Social Network Analysis/Link Analysis/Group Detection

Social Network Analysis/Link Analysis/Group Detection seek to discover interesting relationships and patterns among people or other entities, for example:

• Who communicates with whom?  And who appears to avoid communicating with whom?
• Are there cliques of people who mostly communicate among themselves and rarely with others, or is communication more evenly distributed?
• Are there "stars" who are linked with a very large number or people, and/or isolated people who are only linked with one or two others?
• Might there be aliases?  That is, if we see two people with essentially the same link patterns, but who are never linked with each other, might they in fact be the same person?
• How do patterns of association among entities evolve over time?
• Can we identify groups of entities, based on link data and/or demographic properties?If we know that a communication took place, but we don't know the identity of one of the participants, can we infer who that entity was?

Auton Lab researchers have developed--and continue to develop--many algorithms and associated software packages for investigating these kinds of questions.As usual at the Auton Lab, these technologies place great emphasis on efficient analysis of large datasets.

Software

AFDL - Activity From Demographics and Links   
Bayes Net Learner - As the name sounds
SBNS - Screen-based Bayes Net Structure search                       
GDA/k-groups - Group Detection Algorithm
MNOP - Many Names, One Person alias detection         
XGDA - A fast group detection algorithm 

Datasets

Papers