HSN-PAM: Finding Hierarchical Probabilistic Groups from Large-Scale Networks

Real-world social networks are often hierarchical, re- flecting the fact that some communities are composed of a few smaller, sub-communities. This paper describes a hierarchical Bayesian model based scheme, namely HSN- PAM (Hierarchical Social Network-Pachinko Allocation Model), for discovering probabilistic, hierarchical com- munities in social networks. This scheme is powered by a previously developed hierarchical Bayesian model. In this scheme, communities are classified into two categories: super-communities and regular-communities. Two differ- ent network encoding approaches are explored to evaluate this scheme on research collaborative networks, including CiteSeer and NanoSCI. The experimental results demon- strate that HSN-PAM is effective for discovering hierarchi- cal community structures in large-scale social networks.