Modularity-based approach for tracking communities in dynamic social networks

Community detection is a fundamental task in social network analysis. Online social networks have dramatically increased the volume and speed of interactions among users, enabling advanced analysis of these dynamics. Despite a growing interest in tracking the evolution of groups of users in real-world social networks, most community detection efforts focus on communities within static networks. Here, we describe a framework for tracking communities over time in a dynamic network, where a series of significant events is identified for each community. To this end, a modularity-based strategy is proposed to effectively detect and track dynamic communities. The potential of our framework is shown by conducting extensive experiments on synthetic networks containing embedded events. Results indicate that our framework outperforms other state-of-the-art methods. In addition, we briefly explore how the proposed approach can identify dynamic communities in a Twitter network composed of more than 60,000 users, which posted over 5 million tweets throughout 2020. The proposed framework can be applied to different social network and provides a valuable tool to understand the evolution of communities in dynamic social networks.