Online community detection in social sensing

Abstract

The proliferation of location and GPS data streams which are collected in a wide variety of participatory sensing applications has created numerous possibilities for analysis of the underlying patterns of activity. Typically, the spatio-temporal patterns arising from such activity can be analyzed in order to determine the latent community structure in the underlying data. In this paper, we will examine the problem of online community detection from the location data collected from such social sensing applications in real time. Such data brings numerous challenges associated with it, in that they can be of a relatively large scale, and can be extremely noisy from the perspective of both data representation and analysis. Furthermore, the community structure in the underlying data cannot be directly inferred from the shape of the underlying trajectories, since a considerable amount of variation may exist in terms of trajectories of individuals belonging to the same community. In this paper, we will design online algorithms for community detection in social sensing applications. Our algorithm uses a robust and efficiently updateable model with the use of Gibbs sampling, and we will show its effectiveness and efficiency for social sensing applications. © 2013 ACM.