Ground Truth in Network Communities and Metadata-Aware Community Detection: a Case of School Friendship Network

Abstract

Real-world networks are everywhere and can represent biological, technological, and social interactions. They constitute complicated structures in terms of type of things and their relations. Understanding the network requires better examination of the network structure that can be achieved at various scales including macro, meso, and micro. This research is concerned with meso scale for a student best friendship network where sub-structures in which groups of entities (students) take different functions. In this study we address the following research questions: To what extent would NeoSBM as a stochastic process underlie best friendship interaction and in turn ground truth interactions (i.e. reported best friendship)? Do metadata such as gender or class contribute to this understanding? How can one support school managers from a meta-data aware community detection perspective? Our findings suggest that metadata aware community detection can be an effective method in supporting decision-making for class formation and group formation for in and out school activities.