Exploiting homophily to characterize communities in online social networks

Online social networks (OSNs) have become one of the most popular platforms where people communicate by sharing contents and personal information. The interactions performed by the users allow to identify the homophily between users and reveal the presence of several communities that could depend on several factors: such as the type of relationships (eg, colleagues and school mates) or to users' preferences (eg, users' interests or hobbies). A very important issue in this scenario is the necessary to characterize such communities by using known real properties or attributes about their members. In this article, we propose an approach that identifies the communities of users by exploiting several community detection algorithms. Afterward, for each user, we exploit decision trees to find a model that describes and distinguishes community affiliations based on known attributes of the members. The evaluation of our approach is derived from a real dataset which consists of the profile information, relationships, and interactions of 95 716 Facebook users. The experimental results show that the proposed approach is able to correctly recognize which attributes of the members properly characterize their corresponding community while ensuring a high level of accuracy (about 85%).