Time-Weighted Community Search Based on Interest

Community search aims to provide users with personalized community query services. It is a prerequisite for various recommendation systems and has received widespread attention from academia and industry. The existing literature has established various community search models and algorithms from different dimensions of social networks. Unfortunately, they only judge the representative attributes of users according to the frequency of attribute keywords, completely ignoring the temporal characteristics of keywords. It is clear that a user’s interest changes over time, so it is essential to select users’ representative attributes in combination with time. Therefore, we propose a time-weighted community search model (TWC) based on user interests which fully considers the impact of time on user interests. TWC reduces the number of query parameters as much as possible and improves the usability of the model. We design the time-weighted decay function of the attribute. We then extract the user’s time-weighted representative attributes to express the user’s short-term interests more clearly in the query window. In addition, we propose a new attribute similarity scoring function and a community scoring function. To solve the TWC problem, we design and implement the Local Extend algorithm and the Shrink algorithm. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on a real dataset to verify the superiority of the TWC model and the efficiency of the proposed algorithm.