Community detection based on improved user interaction degree, weighted quasi-local path-based similarity and frequent pattern mining

Community detection is a significant research area in social networks. Most methods use network topology, but combining it with user interactions improves accuracy. This paper proposes a robust method to identify communities based on the improved user interaction degree, the weighted quasi-local structural similarity measure, and the frequent pattern mining on user interactions. In the community creation phase, influential users are identified based on eigenvector centrality and users who interact with them the most are extracted based on frequent pattern mining. In the community expansion phase, we introduce a measure to calculate the degree of user interactions based on the local clustering coefficient improved by interactions between common neighbors. We present two strategies to expand the community. The first strategy, a direct connection, exists between a user outside and a user inside the community. Their similarity is calculated based on the combined measure of improved user interaction degree and user degrees. The second strategy is if two users do not have a direct connection, we consider their communication paths. Therefore, we present a similarity measure combining a quasi-local path-based measure and an improved user interaction degree. Analysis of Higgs Twitter and Flickr datasets using internal density, Normalized Mutual Information, and Adjusted Rand Index shows that this paper's method outperforms the other five community detection methods. Furthermore, our method has more robustness than other relevant methods.