Node-centric Community Discovery: From static to dynamic social network analysis

Nowadays, online social networks represent privileged playgrounds that enable researchers to study, characterize and understand complex human behaviors. Social Network Analysis, commonly known as SNA, is the multidisciplinary field of research under which researchers of different backgrounds perform their studies: one of the hottest topics in such diversified context is indeed Community Discovery. Clustering individuals, whose relations are described by a networked structure, into homogeneous communities is a complex task required by several analytical processes. Moreover, due to the user-centric and dynamic nature of online social services, during the last decades, particular emphasis was dedicated to the definition of node-centric, overlapping and evolutive Community Discovery methodologies. In this paper we provide a comprehensive and concise review of the main results, both algorithmic and analytical, we obtained in this field. Moreover, to better underline the rationale behind our research activity on Community Discovery, in this work we provide a synthetic review of the relevant literature, discussing not only methodological results but also analytical ones.