Online social network trend discovery using frequent subgraph mining

Graph mining has become a well-established discipline within the domain of data mining. It has received much interest over the last decade as advances in computer hardware have provided the processing power to enable large-scale graph data mining to be conducted. Frequent subgraph mining (FSM) plays a very significant role in graph mining, attracting a great deal of attention in different domains, such as Bioinformatics, web data mining and social networks. Online social networks (SNs) play an important role in today’s Internet. These social networks contain huge amounts of data and present a challenging problem. FSM has been used in SNs to identify the frequent pattern trends existing in the network. A frequent pattern trend is defined as a sequence of time-stamped occurrences (support) value for specific frequent pattern that exist in the data. For example, most active researchers, most visited web pages or users’ navigation patterns over the web are few to mention. In the past few years, social network trend mining has been an active area of research. Many graph mining algorithms have been proposed, but a very limited effort exists for capturing an important dimension of SNs, which is trends discovery. Therefore, this paper introduces a novel FSM approach, called A-RAFF (A RAnked Frequent pattern-growth Framework), to discovering and comparing the frequent pattern trends exist in the social network data. Furthermore, the social network frequent pattern trend analysis has been evaluated using two standard social networks, Facebook-like network and the famous MSNBC news network datasets. Consequently, the discovered trends will help the underlying social networks to further enhance their platforms for the betterment of the users as well as for their business growth.