Quantum-PSO based unsupervised clustering of users in social networks using attributes

Unsupervised cluster detection in social network analysis involves grouping social actors into distinct groups, each distinct from the others. Users in the clusters are semantically very similar to those in the same cluster and dissimilar to those in different clusters. Social network clustering reveals a wide range of useful information about users and has many applications in daily life. Various approaches are developed to find social network users' clusters, using only links or attributes and links. This work proposes a method for detecting social network users' clusters based solely on their attributes. In this case, users' attributes are considered categorical values. The most popular clustering algorithm used for categorical data is the K-mode algorithm. However, it may suffer from local optimum due to its random initialization of centroids. To overcome this issue, this manuscript proposes a methodology named the Quantum PSO approach based on user similarity maximization. In the proposed approach, firstly, dimensionality reduction is conducted by performing the relevant attribute set selection followed by redundant attribute removal. Secondly, the QPSO technique is used to maximize the similarity score between users to get clusters. Three different similarity measures are used separately to perform the dimensionality reduction and similarity maximization processes. Experiments are conducted on two popular social network datasets; ego-Twitter, and ego-Facebook. The results show that the proposed approach performs better clustering results in terms of three different performance metrics than K-Mode and K-Mean algorithms.