Geosocial Co-Clustering: A Novel Framework for Geosocial Community Detection

As location-based services using mobile devices have become globally popular these days, social network analysis (especially, community detection) increasingly benefits from combining social relationships with geographic preferences. In this regard, this article addresses the emerging problem of geosocial community detection. We first formalize the problem of geosocial co-clustering, which co-clusters the users in social networks and the locations they visited. Geosocial co-clustering detects higher-quality communities than existing approaches by improving the mapping clusterability, whereby users in the same community tend to visit locations in the same region. While geosocial co-clustering is soundly formalized as non-negative matrix tri-factorization, conventional matrix tri-factorization algorithms suffer from a significant computational overhead when handling large-scale datasets. Thus, we also develop an efficient framework for geosocial co-clustering, called GEOsocial COarsening and DEcomposition (GEOCODE). To achieve efficient matrix tri-factorization, GEOCODE reduces the numbers of users and locations through coarsening and then decomposes the single whole matrix tri-factorization into a set of multiple smaller sub-matrix tri-factorizations. Thorough experiments conducted using real-world geosocial networks show that GEOCODE reduces the elapsed time by 19–69 times while achieving the accuracy of up to 94.8% compared with the state-of-the-art co-clustering algorithm. Furthermore, the benefit of the mapping clusterability is clearly demonstrated through a local expert recommendation application.