MeetupNetDublin

Code and data for community analysis of the Dublin Meetup.com network is provided here for reproducibility purposes, and to support the analysis of Meetup networks in other locations.

Full details of our methodology are provided in the paper [PDF] [SLIDES]:

    MeetupNet Dublin: Discovering Communities in Dublin's Meetup Network (2018)
    Arjun Pakrashi, Elham Alghamdi, Brian Mac Namee, Derek Greene
    Proc. 26th Irish Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science (AICS)
    https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.03046

Code tested with Python 3.6. Dependencies: Pandas, Scikit-learn, NetworkX, Matplotlib.

Data

The Meetup.com website provides an open API that allows access to data from its platform. In September 2018 we used this to collect information about all meetups in Dublin, Ireland. This data was used to construct a weighted network, where each unique meetup is represented as a node, and a weighted edge between two nodes represents an association between the two meetups represented by its endpoint. The file meetup-normalised-comembership.edges contains this network, in edge list format: (i.e. node_id1 node_id2 weight). The corresponding file meetup-metadata.csv contains the corresponding metadata for each node.

Step 1: Network Characterisation

The IPython notebook Meetup Network Characterisation.ipynb applies a number of standard network characterisation approaches to explore the Dublin meetup network.

Step 2: Community Finding

To apply the Python wrapper for OSLOM algorithm to the meetup network, run the script py-oslom.py:

python py-oslom.py data/meetup-normalised-comembership.edges --iters 20 --minsize 2 -r 0.1 -t 0.1 -o results/oslom-communities.comm

Note: Requires the compiled binary of the OSLOM C++ sources, which are available from here.

Step 3: Community Analysis

The IPython notebook Meetup Community Analysis.ipynb analyses the results of applying OSLOM community finding to the Dublin meetup network, using both network-based and text-based techniques.

Step 4: Community Visualisation

The results/MeetupNetDublinInteractive has the code to visualise the communities. To visualise the communities JavaScript GEXF Viewer for Gephi was used. A live online version is available through the following links:

• Community visualisation 1: Based on the weighted degree of every node. Darker colour indicates a higher weighted degree and the size of the node is proportional to the number of members of the respective meetup.
• Community visualisation 2: Different colours represent different communities. Orange coloured nodes are the common nodes between atleast two communities.