Search arXivSearch

arXiv · 2505.12309

Community Search in Time-dependent Road-social Attributed Networks

Abstract

Real-world networks often involve both keywords and locations, along with travel time variations between locations due to traffic conditions. However, most existing cohesive subgraph-based community search studies utilize a single attribute, either keywords or locations, to identify communities. They do not simultaneously consider both keywords and locations, which results in low semantic or spatial cohesiveness of the detected communities, and they fail to account for variations in travel time. Additionally, these studies traverse the entire network to build efficient indexes, but the detected community only involves nodes around the query node, leading to the traversal of nodes that are not relevant to the community. Therefore, we propose the problem of discovering semantic-spatial aware k-core, which refers to a k-core with high semantic and time-dependent spatial cohesiveness containing the query node. To address this problem, we propose an exact and a greedy algorithm, both of which gradually expand outward from the query node. They are local methods that only access the local part of the attributed network near the query node rather than the entire network. Moreover, we design a method to calculate the semantic similarity between two keywords using large language models. This method alleviates the disadvantages of keyword-matching methods used in existing community search studies, such as mismatches caused by differently expressed synonyms and the presence of irrelevant words. Experimental results show that the greedy algorithm outperforms baselines in terms of structural, semantic, and time-dependent spatial cohesiveness.

Explore related subjects

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Li Ni, Hengkai Xu, Lin Mu, Yiwen Zhang, Wenjian Luo. 2025-05-18. Community Search in Time-dependent Road-social Attributed Networks. https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.12309

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

User Influence Analysis Based on Blogs

Rumor and word of mouth spread at the same speed as the highway of information diffusion in the age of the internet. Social networks play quite an important role in the huge internet. Nowadays, social networks have become indispensable in our lives, especially for the government and enterprises. A social network becomes a complex information diffusion network with users working as nodes and the relationships between users working as the vehicle. In this paper, we propose three kinds of algorithms for computing user influence based on the behavior of a user's forwarding microblogs and the symbol of @ in microblogs. We evaluate the effectiveness of the algorithms by comparing the results of our work with the training data in the dataset, and in the end, it proves that our algorithms work well.

cs.SI

Location transparency reduces activity by accounts misrepresenting their location on X

Concerns about inauthentic accounts, including foreign actors posing as domestic voices, are central to debates about online discourse. Yet, little is known about accounts with inaccurate location claims and how they behave when discrepancies between their claimed and actual locations become publicly visible. In November 2025, X introduced an "About this account" feature that discloses each account's platform-inferred location of operation. We leverage this intervention in a large-scale quasi-experimental study of 8,200 politically engaged accounts claiming a U.S. location, comparing accounts whose disclosed locations matched versus contradicted their claims across 1.3 million posts and 3.6 million replies over 21 weeks. Before disclosure, location-mismatched accounts posted more misleading, scam-related, and cryptocurrency-related content, but showed no distinctive partisan leaning. Difference-in-differences estimates show that disclosure reduced the posting activity of location-mismatched accounts by 13.1% with the largest declines among accounts revealed to be in Africa (29.2%) and Asia (24.4%), and among accounts with VPN flags, username changes, or scam- and crypto-heavy content. Additionally, the decline in their replies was concentrated in interactions with U.S.-based recipients (10.3%), whereas replies to non-U.S.-based recipients showed no statistically significant change. Conversely, there was no significant change in average audience engagement with their posts. Location transparency thus works primarily by inducing restraint among the disclosed accounts rather than by shifting audience behaviour, and the accounts it constrains look at least as much like cross-border fraud as foreign political influence.

cs.SI

Diffusion-Induced Spatial Attention Overlapping Community Detection

Detection of overlapping communities is essential for modelling networks in which nodes participate simultaneously in multiple structural or functional groups. Existing graph neural network approaches commonly rely on local message passing, which can obscure community boundaries through smoothing and limit the representation of structurally relevant long-range dependencies. We introduce Diffusion-Induced Spatial Attention Community Detection (DISCO), a deep-learning framework that combines a structural prior derived from influence spreading dynamics, sparse multi-head attention, and non-negative community-affiliation learning. The prior identifies candidate interactions beyond immediate graph neighbours and biases attention according to their structural proximity, while a Bernoulli-Poisson edge-reconstruction objective enables overlapping community inference from node attributes and structural profiles, or both. Benchmark experiments show that DISCO performs competitively against established graph convolutional and graph attention approaches across different input configurations. To demonstrate its practical applicability, we present a proof-of-concept cybersecurity use case in which changes between community assignments inferred from consecutive communication-network snapshots provide an interpretable anomaly signal. Temporal community similarity identifies structural deviations, while node-level contributions help locate the devices associated with them. DISCO therefore provides both a flexible method for overlapping community detection and a foundation for analysing structural change in dynamic networks.

cs.SI