Real-Time Multi-Criteria Social Graph Partitioning: A Game Theoretic Approach

Graph partitioning has attracted considerable attention due to its high practicality for real-world applications. It is particularly relevant to social networks because it enables the grouping of users into communities for market analysis and advertising purposes. In this paper, we introduce RMGP, a type of real-time multi-criteria graph partitioning for social networks that groups the users based on their connectivity and their similarity to a set of input classes. We consider RMGP as an on-line task, which may be frequently performed for different query parameters (e.g., classes). In order to overcome the serious performance issues associated with the large social graphs found in practice, we develop solutions based on a game theoretic framework. Specifically, we consider each user as a player, whose goal is to find the class that optimizes his objective function. We propose algorithms based on best-response dynamics, analyze their properties, and show their efficiency and effectiveness on real datasets under centralized and decentralized scenarios.