Identifying and Classifying Social Groups: A Machine Learning Approach

The identification of social groups remains one of the main analytical themes in the analysis of social networks and, in more general terms, in the study of social organization. Traditional network approaches to group identification encounter a variety of problems when the data to be analyzed involve two-mode networks, i.e., relations between two distinct sets of objects with no reflexive relation allowed within each set. In this paper we propose a relatively novel approach to the recognition and identification of social groups in data generated by network-based processes in the context of two-mode networks. Our approach is based on a family of learning algorithms called Support Vector Machines (SVM). The analytical framework provided by SVM provides a flexible statistical environment to solve classification tasks, and to reframe regression and density estimation problems. We explore the relative merits of our approach to the analysis of social networks in the context of the well known “Southern women” (SW) data set collected by Davis Gardner and Gardner. We compare our results with those that have been produced by different analytical approaches. We show that our method, which acts as a data-independent preprocessing step, is able to reduce the complexity of the clustering problem enabling the application of simpler configurations of common algorithms.