Temporal Identification of Latent Communities on Twitter

Abstract: User communities in social networks are usually identified by considering explicit structural social connections between users. While such communities can reveal important information about their members such as family or friendship ties and geographical proximity, they do not necessarily succeed at pulling like-minded users that share the same interests together. In this paper, we are interested in identifying communities of users that share similar topical interests over time, regardless of whether they are explicitly connected to each other on the social network. More specifically, we tackle the problem of identifying temporal topic-based communities from Twitter, i.e., communities of users who have similar temporal inclination towards the current emerging topics on Twitter. We model each topic as a collection of highly correlated semantic concepts observed in tweets and identify them by clustering the time-series based representation of each concept built based on each concept's observation frequency over time. Based on the identified emerging topics in a given time period, we utilize multivariate time series analysis to model the contributions of each user towards the identified topics, which allows us to detect latent user communities. Through our experiments on Twitter data, we demonstrate i) the effectiveness of our topic detection method to detect real world topics and ii) the effectiveness of our approach compared to well-established approaches for community detection.