Deep-learning-based community detection approach on multimedia social networks

Exploiting multimedia data to analyze social networks has recently become one the most challenging issues for Social Network Analysis (SNA), leading to defining Multimedia Social Networks (MSNs). In particular, these networks consider new ways of interaction and further relationships among users to support various SNA tasks: influence analysis, expert finding, community identifica-tion, item recommendation, and so on. In this paper, we present a hypergraph-based data model to represent all the different types of relationships among users within an MSN, often mediated by multimedia data. In particular, by considering only user-to-user paths that exploit particular hyperarcs and relevant to a given application, we were able to transform the initial hypergraph into a proper adjacency matrix, where each element represents the strength of the link between two users. This matrix was then computed in a novel way through a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), suitably modified to handle high data sparsity, in order to generate communities among users. Several experiments on standard datasets showed the effectiveness of the proposed methodology compared to other approaches in the literature.