Mining and Visualizing the Evolution of Subgroups in Social Networks

A social network consists of people who interact in some way such as members of online communities sharing information via the WWW. To learn more about how to facilitate community building e.g. in organizations, it is important to analyze the interaction behavior of their members over time. So far, many tools have been provided that allow for the analysis of static networks and some for the temporal analysis of networks - however only on the vertex and edge level. In this paper we propose two approaches to analyze the evolution of two different types of online communities on the level of subgroups. The first method consists of statistical analyses and visualizations that allow for an interactive analysis of subgroup evolutions in communities that exhibit a rather membership structure. The second method is designed for the detection of communities in an environment with highly fluctuating members. For both methods, we discuss results of experiments with real data from an online student community