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Graph Theoretic and Spectral Analysis of Enron Email Data

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Abstract

Analysis of social networks to identify communities and model their evolution has been an active area of recent research. This paper analyzes the Enron email data set to discover structures within the organization. The analysis is based on constructing an email graph and studying its properties with both graph theoretical and spectral analysis techniques. The graph theoretical analysis includes the computation of several graph metrics such as degree distribution, average distance ratio, clustering coefficient and compactness over the email graph. The spectral analysis shows that the email adjacency matrix has a rank-2 approximation. It is shown that preprocessing of data has significant impact on the results, thus a standard form is needed for establishing a benchmark data.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY, 12180

    Anurat Chapanond, Mukkai S. Krishnamoorthy & Bülent Yener

Authors
  1. Anurat Chapanond
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  2. Mukkai S. Krishnamoorthy
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  3. Bülent Yener
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Correspondence to Anurat Chapanond.

Additional information

Anurat Chapanond is currently a Ph.D. student in Computer Science, RPI. Anurat graduated B. Eng. degree in Computer Engineering from Chiangmai University (Thailand) in 1997, M. S. in Computer Science from Columbia University in 2002. His research interest is in web data mining analyses and algorithms.

M.S. Krishnamoorthy received the B.E. degree (with honors) from Madras University in 1969, the M. Tech degree in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, in 1971, and the Ph. D. degree in Computer Science, also from the Indian Institute of Technology, in 1976.

From 1976 to 1979, he was an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur. From 1979 to 1985, he was an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY, and since, 1985, he has been an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Rensselaer. Dr. Krishnamoorthy's research interests are in the design and analysis of combinatorial and algebraic algorithms, visualization algorithms and programming environments.

Bulent Yener is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Co-Director of Pervasive Computing and Networking Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York. He is also a member of Griffiss Institute of Information Assurance.

Dr. Yener received MS. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science, both from Columbia University, in 1987 and 1994, respectively. Before joining to RPI, he was a Member of Technical Staff at the Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey.

His current research interests include bioinformatics, medical informtatics, routing problems in wireless networks, security and information assurance, intelligence and security informatics. He has served on the Technical Program Committee of leading IEEE conferences and workshops. Currently He is an associate editor of ACM/Kluwer Winet journal and the IEEE Network Magazine. Dr. Yener is a Senior Member of the IEEE Computer Society.

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Chapanond, A., Krishnamoorthy, M.S. & Yener, B. Graph Theoretic and Spectral Analysis of Enron Email Data. Comput Math Organiz Theor 11, 265–281 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10588-005-5381-4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10588-005-5381-4

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