Role-Dynamics: Fast Mining of Large Dynamic Networks

Abstract: To understand the structural dynamics of a large-scale social, biological or technological network, it may be useful to discover behavioral roles representing the main connectivity patterns present over time. In this paper, we propose a scalable non-parametric approach to automatically learn the structural dynamics of the network and individual nodes. Roles may represent structural or behavioral patterns such as the center of a star, peripheral nodes, or bridge nodes that connect different communities. Our novel approach learns the appropriate structural role dynamics for any arbitrary network and tracks the changes over time. In particular, we uncover the specific global network dynamics and the local node dynamics of a technological, communication, and social network. We identify interesting node and network patterns such as stationary and non-stationary roles, spikes/steps in role-memberships (perhaps indicating anomalies), increasing/decreasing role trends, among many others. Our results indicate that the nodes in each of these networks have distinct connectivity patterns that are non-stationary and evolve considerably over time. Overall, the experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach for fast mining and tracking of the dynamics in large networks. Furthermore, the dynamic structural representation provides a basis for building more sophisticated models and tools that are fast for exploring large dynamic networks.