Abstract:Community structure in social networks (SNS) could provide interesting information, such as the pattern of social activities between individuals and the trend of social development. Traditional methods to identify communities on static social networks will miss interesting laws how SNS change. The few methods on modeling and analyzing of community structures in dynamic social networks, which are obtaining more and more attention recently, fail to identify large networks in acceptable time. This paper proposes an incremental new method to identify community structure in dynamic social networks. Utilizing the time locality that there’s little change in adjacent network snapshots, the paper incrementally analyzes social networks to avoid repeatedly partitioning the whole networks. Experiments demonstrate that this approach offers orders-of-magnitude performance improvement over state-of-the-art approaches on large scale networks (105 nodes) and can produce nice community structures which reflect the essence of SNS.