Meerkat (SNA)
| Initial release | 31 July 2011 |
|---|---|
| Stable release | 1.001
/ 2 February 2018 |
| Written in | Java, JavaFx |
| Engine | |
| Operating system | Linux, Windows, macOS |
| Size | 109.0 MB |
| Available in | English |
| Type | Social Network Analysis and Visualization |
| Website | amii |
Search Meerkat (SNA) on Amazon.
Meerkat (SNA) is a social network analysis software and GUI application developed in Java and JavaFx. It offers features for exploring social networks, visualising networks through multiple layout algorithms, analysing subsets of networks, performing community mining with several algorithms, and revealing network dynamics at the community level. It allows the user to compute descriptive node and community metrics and provides capabilities for event analysis for dynamic networks that have been observed at multiple points in time.
Meerkat is developed by a team led by Osmar R. Zaiane at the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute, Amii to help practitioners better comprehend and analyse vast amounts of data in the form of social networks. Given a set of objects and their interactions with each other, Meerkat uses sophisticated algorithms, some of which is developed at Amii, to automatically identify groups of objects that are meaningfully connected, which we call communities. Meerkat carefully lays the network out on the screen to minimise occlusion and highlight communities. It also provides information about the most influential and central nodes within each community.
Features[edit]
- Graph Editing via UI - Edit the structure of the graph via GUI interaction. The user can edit a graph by adding or deleting a set of vertices or edges.
- Graph Canvas View - Manipulate views of the graph via features such as zoom in, zoom out and dragging the graph on the graph canvas area. The user can change the position of vertices on the graph by dragging them on the graph canvas area. The user can change the size and color of vertices and edges of the graph as well.
- Minimap - Bird's-eye view of the graph. The minimap shows a snapshot of the entire graph where the graph display area is unshaded and the non-visible part is shaded.
- Layouts - Meerkat provides three types of layout algorithms:
- Standard Layouts - Circle, Random, Kamada-Kawai [1], Fruchterman-Reingold [2], ForceAtlas2 [3] and Modified Fruchterman-Reingold
- Metric Layouts - Authority and Hub [4], Betweenness Centrality [5], Closeness Centrality [6], In-Degree and Out-Degree [7] and Pagerank [8]. The result is plotted on graph canvas in bulls eye style.
- Community Layouts - ComB and ComC layouts.
- Community Mining - Compute and visualise groups of similar nodes based on edges in the graph. User can perform community mining by selecting any one of the following 6 algorithms in Meerkat : Fast Modularity [9], Louvain [10], K-means clustering [11], Local T [12], Local Top Leaders [13], Rosvall Infomap [14], Rosvall Infomod [15], Same Attribute Value, Dynamic Community Mining [16] and Local Community.
- Centrality Metrics - users can calculate a number of graph metrics and measures to analyse the graph and its nodes. Authority [4], Hub [4], Betweenness Centrality[5], Closeness Centrality [6], In-Degree [7], Out-Degree [7] and Pagerank [8] metrics are provided in Meerkat.
Event Analysis[edit]
Meerkat also provides information on the evolution of communities using dynamic community mining. Meerkat provides algorithm to compute and analyse changes in the structure of communities over time. Critical events of communities and nodes can enable user to track the evolution of communities. This type of analysis provides insight into the underlying behaviour of the network.
There are nine different types of events in dynamic community mining [16] which is divided into two different categories:
- Community Events: Formed, Dissolved, Survived, Split and Merged.
- Node Events: Appeared, Disappeared, Joined and Left.
File Formats[edit]
The various file formats supported by Meerkat are:
References[edit]
- ↑ Kamada, Tomihisa; Kawai, Satoru (1989), "An algorithm for drawing general undirected graphs", Information Processing Letters, Elsevier, 31 (1): 7–15, doi:10.1016/0020-0190(89)90102-6.
- ↑ Fruchterman, Thomas M. J.; Reingold, Edward M. (1991), "Graph Drawing by Force-Directed Placement", Software – Practice & Experience, Wiley, 21 (11): 1129–1164, doi:10.1002/spe.4380211102.
- ↑ Jacomy, Mathieu; Venturini, Tommaso; Heymann, Sebastien; Bastian, Mathieu (10 June 2014). "ForceAtlas2, a Continuous Graph Layout Algorithm for Handy Network Visualization Designed for the Gephi Software". PLOS One. 9 (6): e98679. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0098679. ISSN 1932-6203. PMID 24914678.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 Kleinberg, Jon M. (1 September 1999). "Authoritative sources in a hyperlinked environment". Journal of the ACM (JACM). 46 (5): 604–632. doi:10.1145/324133.324140. ISSN 0004-5411.
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 Freeman, Linton C. (1977). "A Set of Measures of Centrality Based on Betweenness". Sociometry. 40 (1): 35–41. doi:10.2307/3033543. JSTOR 3033543.
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 Hage, Per; Harary, Frank (1995). "Eccentricity and centrality in networks". Social Networks. 17 (1): 57–63. doi:10.1016/0378-8733(94)00248-9.
- ↑ 7.0 7.1 7.2 "Directed graph". Wikipedia. 2 February 2018.
- ↑ 8.0 8.1 Page, Lawrence; Brin, Sergey; Motwani, Rajeev; Winograd, Terry (1999). "The PageRank Citation Ranking: Bringing Order to the Web". Stanford InfoLab (1999–66).
- ↑ Clauset, Aaron; Newman, M. E. J.; Moore, Cristopher (6 December 2004). "Finding community structure in very large networks". Physical Review E. 70 (6): 066111. doi:10.1103/PhysRevE.70.066111.
- ↑ Blondel, Vincent D.; Guillaume, Jean-Loup; Lambiotte, Renaud; Lefebvre, Etienne (2008). "Fast unfolding of communities in large networks". Journal of Statistical Mechanics: Theory and Experiment. 2008 (10): P10008. doi:10.1088/1742-5468/2008/10/P10008. ISSN 1742-5468.
- ↑ Hartigan, J. A.; Wong, M. A. (1979). "Algorithm AS 136: A K-Means Clustering Algorithm". Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. Series C (Applied Statistics). 28 (1): 100–108. doi:10.2307/2346830. JSTOR 2346830.
- ↑ Fagnan, J.; Zaïane, O.; Barbosa, D. (2014). "Using triads to identify local community structure in social networks". 2014 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM 2014): 108–112. doi:10.1109/ASONAM.2014.6921568. ISBN 978-1-4799-5877-1.
- ↑ Khorasgani, Reihaneh Rabbany; Chen, Jiyang; Zaïane, Osmar R. (2013). "Top leaders community detection approach in information networks". In Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Social Network Mining and Analysis, 2010. ISSN : 2319-7323: 228.
- ↑ Rosvall, Martin; Bergstrom, Carl T. (29 January 2008). "Maps of random walks on complex networks reveal community structure". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 105 (4): 1118–1123. doi:10.1073/pnas.0706851105. ISSN 0027-8424.
- ↑ Rosvall, Martin; Bergstrom, Carl T. (1 May 2007). "An information-theoretic framework for resolving community structure in complex networks". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 104 (18): 7327–7331. doi:10.1073/pnas.0611034104. ISSN 0027-8424.
- ↑ 16.0 16.1 Takaffoli, Mansoureh; Sangi, Farzad; Fagnan, Justin; Zäıane, Osmar R. (1 January 2011). "Community Evolution Mining in Dynamic Social Networks". Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences. 22: 49–58. doi:10.1016/j.sbspro.2011.07.055. ISSN 1877-0428.
This article "Meerkat (SNA)" is from Wikipedia. The list of its authors can be seen in its historical and/or the page Edithistory:Meerkat (SNA). Articles copied from Draft Namespace on Wikipedia could be seen on the Draft Namespace of Wikipedia and not main one.
