OCTracker: A Density-Based Framework for Tracking the Evolution of Overlapping Communities in OSNs

In this paper, we propose a unified framework OCTracker for tracking overlapping community evolution in online social networks. OCTracker adapts a preliminary community structure towards dynamic changes in social networks using a novel density-based approach for detecting overlapping community structures and automatically detects evolutionary events like birth, growth, contraction, merge, split, and death of communities with time. Unlike other density-based community detection methods, the proposed method does not require the neighborhood threshold parameter to be set by the users, rather it automatically determines the same for each node locally.