Exploration of Link Structure and Community-Based Node Roles in Network Analysis

Communities are nodes in a network that are grouped together based on a common set of properties. While the communities and link structures are often thought to be in alignment, it may not be the case when the communities are defined using other external criterion. In this paper we provide a new way to measure the alignment. We also provide a new metric that can be used to estimate the number of communities to which a node is attached. This metric, along with degree, is used to assign a community-based role to nodes. We demonstrate the usefulness of the community-based node roles by applying them to the influence maximization problem.