A Multidimensional and Multimembership Clustering Method for Social Networks and Its Application in Customer Relationship Management

Community detection in social networks plays an important role in cluster analysis. Many traditional techniques for one-dimensional problems have been proven inadequate for high-dimensional or mixed type datasets due to the data sparseness and attribute redundancy. In this paper we propose a graph-based clustering method for multidimensional datasets. This novel method has two distinguished features: nonbinary hierarchical tree and the multi-membership clusters. The nonbinary hierarchical tree clearly highlights meaningful clusters, while the multimembership feature may provide more useful service strategies. Experimental results on the customer relationship management confirm the effectiveness of the new method.