A Diffusion of Innovation-Based Closeness Measure for Network Associations

Network association is a prevalent representation when dealing with data from present-day applications. Examples are crime event connections in criminology, cellphone call graphs in telecommunication, co-authorship networks in bibliometrics, etc. A large body of work has been devoted to the analysis of these networks and the discovery of their underlying structures. One important structure is the notion of community i.e. a group of nodes that are relatively cohesive within and reasonably disjointed outside. Finding the communities usually relies on a closeness/distance measure between network nodes. In this paper, we propose a novel closeness measure, named iCloseness, inspired by the theory of Diffusion of Innovations in anthropology. It is computed based on the intersection of neighbourhoods and quantifies the closeness of two nodes. To apply this measure we adjusted the Top Leaders community mining method to use this measure for community detection. Experimental results on real world and synthesized information networks show the effectiveness of our proposed measure and highly motivate the application of the iCloseness measure in the context of community mining.