Before I started my PhD in
Sune Lehmann's Lab, I did a cool
little project with him. Following his and Vedran Sekara's
PNAS paper
on social cores he wanted me to build a data visualization that showed
the temporal dynamics of these social cores (or "groups" is you will).
Over a semester I did just that, and I was even so lucky to
win first place
in Science Magazine's Data Stories competetion with this
visualization as my entry.
→
Here is the data visualization.
So when I started my PhD, we figured it would be nice to revisit this and make the community detection part (finding the social cores) a little better. We teamed up with Martin Rosvall, author of Infomap, and developed a good flow-based algorithm for community detection in temporal networks. We put it in Physical Review E (also on the arXiv), and integrated the method into Infomap with the flag --multilayer-js-relax-rate. Here's a figure from the paper, showing some social groups at the Technical University of Denmark expanding and contracting over a day:
