Forbidden Nodes Aware Community Search

Abstract Community search is an important problem in network analysis, which has attracted much attention in recent years. It starts with some given nodes, pays more attention to local network structures, and gets personalized resultant communities quickly. In this paper, we argue that there are many real scenarios where some nodes are not allowed to appear in the community. Then, we introduce a new concept called forbidden nodes and present a new problem of forbidden nodes aware community search to describe these scenarios.To address the above problem, three methods are proposed, i.e., k-core based FORTE (Forbidden nOdes awaRe communiTy sEarch), k-truss based FORTE and CW based FORTE, where the effects of both forbidden nodes and query nodes are thoroughly considered for each node in the resultant community. The former two methods are able to make use of popular community structures, while the latter is based on a new metric called weighted conductance. The extensive experiments conducted on real data sets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods.