Twitter Community Discovery & Analysis Using Topologies Andrew McClain Karen Aguar

Outline Introduction Motivation Project Description o Our Objective o Community Discovery o Analysis & Application Data collection Use of Gephi

Introduction Many people use services like twitter to stay in contact with groups in which they are members or to interact with other people with similar interests These groups are considered “communities”

Community? A network or group of nodes with greater ties internally than to the rest of the network There are various derivations of a community: o Some communities are tightly bound together o Others are loose associations of people Communities can be defined by a quality function o Several quality functions may be used & will vary based on the situations o Experimentally determine the best quality function for our purposes

Motivation We want to classify these communities & find real world implications of their digital associations Project Description: Discovering communities & examining the properties of the graph to give us insight into the community itself. Ex: Find the organizers of a hobby group by the twitter activity

Our Project Our project can be broken into 2 main sections 1.Twitter community discovery 2.Analysis of the community graphs & its correlation to the real world community structure

Community Discovery 1.Select a diverse number of individuals from known real-world communities 2.Apply local graph clustering to isolate the community that they belong to 1.Example: CNN 3.Generate graphs of the communities

Analysis & Application 1.Analyze the relationships in the graphs using a variety of analysis techniques 2.Detect behavior patterns and structures in twitter communities 1.Shape, interconnectivity, how the information flows through it 3.Apply our knowledge to learn about unknown communities based on twitter behavior *time permitting

Data Collection Datasets containing actual tweets are now unavailable due to a change in Twitter’s terms of use. We will collect our own data through the use of: Twitter Rest API Gephi -- open source graph visualization platform o Retweet plugin for Gephi

Gephi for Community Discovery We will use Gephi partitioning methods to set different ways of partitioning the graph & use quality functions to determine what is / is not a community. Gephi gives us very powerful filter functions so that we can reduce data down to what we want very quickly

References Community Discovery in Social Networks: Applications, Methods and Emerging Trends o S. Parthasarathy, Y. Ruan, V. Satuluri [2011] gephi.com dev.twitter.com