Data Mining on Social Interaction Networks

Social media and social networks have already woven themselves into the very fabric of everyday life. This results in a dramatic increase of social data capturing various relations between the users and their associated artifacts, both in online networks and the real world using ubiquitous devices. In this work, we consider social interaction networks from a data mining perspective - also with a special focus on real-world face-to-face contact networks: We combine data mining and social network analysis techniques for examining the networks in order to improve our understanding of the data, the modeled behavior, and its underlying emergent processes. Furthermore, we adapt, extend and apply known predictive data mining algorithms on social interaction networks. Additionally, we present novel methods for descriptive data mining for uncovering and extracting relations and patterns for hypothesis generation and exploration, in order to provide characteristic information about the data and networks. The presented approaches and methods aim at extracting valuable knowledge for enhancing the understanding of the respective data, and for supporting the users of the respective systems. We consider data from several social systems, like the social bookmarking system BibSonomy, the social resource sharing system flickr, and ubiquitous social systems: Specifically, we focus on data from the social conference guidance system Conferator and the social group interaction system MyGroup. This work first gives a short introduction into social interaction networks, before we describe several analysis results in the context of online social networks and real-world face-to-face contact networks. Next, we present predictive data mining methods, i.e., for localization, recommendation and link prediction. After that, we present novel descriptive data mining methods for mining communities and patterns.