Mining exceptional social behavior on attributed interaction networks

Abstract

Social interactions are prevalent in our lives. These can be observed, e. g., online using social media, however, also offline specifically using sensors. In such contexts, typically time-stamped interactions are recorded, which can also be inferred from real-time location of humans. Such interaction data can then be modeled as so-called social interaction networks. For their analysis, a variety of different approaches can be applied. A prominent research direction is then the detection of patterns describing specific subgroups with exceptional behavioral characteristics, given some measure of interest. In the standard case of plain graphs modeling the interaction networks, methods for identifying such subgroups mainly focus on structural characteristics of the network and/or the induced subgraph. For attributed social networks, then additional attributive information can be exploited. This paper proposes to focus on the dyadic structure of the attributed social interaction networks, thus enabling a compositional perspective for identifying interesting subgroup patterns. Specifically, we can then analyze spatio-temporal data modeled as attributed social interaction networks for identifying exceptional social behavior. The presented approach adapts local pattern mining using subgroup discovery to the dyadic setting, exploiting attribute information of the spatio-temporal attributed interaction networks. With this, specific characteristics of social interactions are considered, i. e., duration and frequency, for identifying subgroups capturing social behavior that deviates from the norm. For subgroup discovery, we propose according interestingness measures in the form of seven novel quality functions and discuss their properties. In our experimentation, we perform an evaluation demonstrating the efficacy of the presented approach using four real-world datasets on face-to-face interactions in academic conferencing as well as school playground contexts. Our results indicate that the proposed method returns interesting, meaningful, and valid findings and results.