Digger

People participate in multiple online social networks, e.g., Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin, and these social networks with heterogeneous social content and user relationship are named as heterogeneous social networks. Group structure widely exists in heterogeneous social networks, which reveals the evolution of human cooperation. Detecting similar groups in heterogeneous networks has a great significance for many applications, such as recommendation system and spammer detection, using the wealth of group information. Although promising, this novel problem encounters a variety of technical challenges, including incomplete data, high time complexity, and ground truth. To address the research gap and technical challenges, we take advantage of a ratio-cut optimization function to model this novel problem by the linear mixed-effects method and graph spectral theory. Based on this model, we propose an efficient algorithm called Digger to detect the similar groups in the large graphs. Digger consists of three steps, including measuring user similarity, construct a matching graph, and detecting similar groups. We adopt several strategies to lower the computational cost and detail the basis of labeling the ground truth. We evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of our algorithm on five different types of online social networks. The extensive experiments show that our method achieves 0.693, 0.783, and 0.735 in precision, recall, and F1-measure, which significantly surpass the state-of-arts by 24.4%, 15.3%, and 20.7%, respectively. The results demonstrate that our proposal can detect similar groups in heterogeneous networks effectively.