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International Conference on Combinatorial Optimization and Applications

COCOA 2016: Combinatorial Optimization and Applications pp 763–771Cite as

Unfolding the Core Structure of the Reciprocal Graph of a Massive Online Social Network

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 10043))

Abstract

Google+ (G+ in short) is a directed online social network where nodes have either reciprocal (bidirectional) edges or parasocial (one-way) edges. As reciprocal edges represent strong social ties, we study the core structure of the subgraph formed by them, referred to as the reciprocal network of G+. We develop an effective three-step procedure to hierarchically extract and unfold the core structure of this reciprocal network. This procedure builds up and generalizes ideas from the existing k-shell decomposition and clique percolation approaches, and produces higher-level representations of the core structure of the G+ reciprocal network. Our analysis shows that there are seven subgraphs (“communities”) comprising of dense clusters of cliques lying at the center of the core structure of the G+ reciprocal network, through which other communities of cliques are richly connected. Together they form the core to which “peripheral” sparse subgraphs are attached.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    In this paper we use the terms “user" and “node" interchangeable.

  2. 2.

    It contains more than 90 % of the nodes with at least one reciprocal edge in G+. Hence, our analysis of the dataset is eventually approximate.

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported in part by DoD ARO MURI Award W911NF-12-1-0385, DTRA grant HDTRA1- 14-1-0040 and NSF grant CNS-1411636. We thank the authors of [6] for the datasets.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, MN, USA

    Braulio Dumba & Zhi-Li Zhang

Authors
  1. Braulio Dumba
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  2. Zhi-Li Zhang
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Correspondence to Braulio Dumba .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China

    T-H. Hubert Chan

  2. City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China

    Minming Li

  3. City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China

    Lusheng Wang

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Dumba, B., Zhang, ZL. (2016). Unfolding the Core Structure of the Reciprocal Graph of a Massive Online Social Network. In: Chan, TH., Li, M., Wang, L. (eds) Combinatorial Optimization and Applications. COCOA 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10043. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-48749-6_58

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-48749-6_58

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-48748-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-48749-6

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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