Community detection and mining in social media

Lei Tang

The past decade has witnessed the emergence of participatory Web and social media, bringing people together in many creative ways. Millions of users are playing, tagging, working, and socializing online, demonstrating new forms of collaboration, communication, and intelligence that were hardly imaginable just a short time ago. Social media also helps reshape business models, sway opinions and emotions, and opens up numerous possibilities to study human interaction and collective behavior in an unparalleled scale.This lecture, from a data mining perspective, introduces characteristics of social media, reviews representative tasks of computing with social media, and illustrates associated challenges. It introduces basic concepts, presents state-of-the-art algorithms with easy-to-understand examples, and recommends effective evaluation methods. In particular,we discuss graph-based...