Overlapping Community Detection by Collective Friendship Group Inference

There has been considerable interest in improving the capability to identify communities within large collections of social networking data. However, many of the existing algorithms will compartment an actor (node) into a single group, ignoring the fact that in real-world situations people tend to belong concurrently to multiple groups. Our work focuses on the ability to find overlapping communities by aggregating the community perspectives of friendship groups, derived from egonets. We will demonstrate that our algorithm not only finds overlapping communities, but additionally helps identify key members, which bind communities together. Additionally, we will highlight the parallel feature of the algorithm as a means of improving runtime performance.