A System for Identifying and Visualizing Influential Communities

Abstract: In this paper, we introduce the concept of influential communities in a co-author network. We term a community as the most influential if the community has the highest influence among all other communities in the entire network. Influence of a community depends on the impact of the contents (e.g., citations of papers) generated by the members of that community. We propose an algorithm to identify the top K influential communities of an online social network. As a working prototype, we develop a visualization system that allows a user to find the top K influential communities from a co-author network. A user can search top K influential communities of particular research fields and our system provides him/her with a visualization of these communities. A user can explore the details of a community, such as authors, citations, and collaborations with other communities.