Information Granulation-Based Community Detection for Social Networks

Online social networks (OSNs) have become so popular that it has changed the Internet to a more collaborative environment. Now, a third of the world’s population participates in OSNs, forming communities, and producing and consuming media in different ways. The recent boom of artificial intelligence technologies provides new opportunities to help improve the processing and mining of social data. In this article, an algorithm that can detect communities in the OSNs using the concepts of granular computing in rough sets is proposed. In this information model, a social network as a rough set granular social network (RGSN) is modeled. A new community detection algorithm named granular-based community detection (GBCD) is implemented. This article also defines and uses two measures, namely, a granular community factor and an object community factor. The proposed algorithm is evaluated on four real-world data sets as well as computer-generated data sets. The model is compared with other state-of-the-art community detection algorithms for the values of modularity, normalized mutual information (NMI), Omega index, accuracy, specificity, sensitivity, and $F1$ -measure. The cumulative performance of the GBCD algorithm is found to be 3.99, which outperforms other state-of-the-art community detection algorithms.