A framework for exploring organizational structure in dynamic social networks

Recent research has provided promising results relating to discovering communities within a social network. We find that further representing the organizational structure of a social network is an interesting issue that helps gain better understandings of the social network. In this paper, we define a data structure, named Community Tree, to depict the organizational structure and provide a framework for exploring the organizational structure in a social network. In this framework, an algorithm, which combines a modified PageRank and Random Walk on graph, is developed to derive the community tree from the social network. In the real world, a social network is constantly evolving. In order to explore the organizational structure in a dynamic social network, we develop a tree learning algorithm, which employs tree edit distance as the scoring function, to derive an evolving community tree that enables a smooth transition between two community trees. We also propose an approach to threading communities in community trees to obtain an evolution graph of the organizational structure, by which we can reach new insights from the dynamic social network. The experiments conducted on synthetic and real dataset demonstrate the feasibility and applicability of the framework. Based on the theoretical outcomes, we further apply the proposed framework to explore the evolution of organizational structure with the 2001 Enron dataset, and obtain several interesting findings that match the context of Enron.