Random Walk-based Community Key-members Search over Large Graphs

Given a graph $G$, a query node $q$, and an integer $k$, community search (CS) seeks a cohesive subgraph (measured by community models such as $k$-core or $k$-truss) from $G$ that contains $q$. It is difficult for ordinary users with less knowledge of graphs' complexity to set an appropriate $k$. Even if we define quite a large $k$, the community size returned by CS is often too large for users to gain much insight about it. Compared against the entire community, key-members in the community appear more valuable than others. To contend with this, we focus on Community Key-members Search problem (CKS). We turn our perspective to the key-members in the community containing $q$ instead of the entire community. To solve CKS problem, we first propose an exact algorithm based on truss decomposition as a baseline. Then, we present four random walk-based optimized algorithms to achieve a trade-off between effectiveness and efficiency, by carefully considering three important cohesiveness features in the design of transition matrix. As a result, we return key-members according to the stationary distribution when random walk converges. We theoretically analyze the rationality of designing the cohesiveness-aware transition matrix for random walk, through Bayesian theory based on Gaussian Mixture Model with Box-Cox Transformation and Copula Function Fitting. Moreover, we propose a lightweight refinement method following an ``expand-replace" manner to further optimize the result with little overhead, and we extend our method for CKS with multiple query nodes. Comprehensive experimental studies on various real-world datasets demonstrate our method's superiority.