Mining Periodic Behavior in Dynamic Social Networks

Social interactions that occur regularly typically correspond to significant yet often infrequent and hard to detect interaction patterns. To identify such regular behavior, we propose a new mining problem of finding periodic or near periodic subgraphs in dynamic social networks. We analyze the computational complexity of the problem, showing that, unlike any of the related subgraph mining problems, it is polynomial. We propose a practical, efficient and scalable algorithm to find such subgraphs that takes imperfect periodicity into account. We demonstrate the applicability of our approach on several real-world networks and extract meaningful and interesting periodic interaction patterns.