A novel state space reduction algorithm for team formation in social networks

PLoS One. 2021 Dec 2;16(12):e0259786. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0259786. eCollection 2021.

Abstract

Team formation (TF) in social networks exploits graphs (i.e., vertices = experts and edges = skills) to represent a possible collaboration between the experts. These networks lead us towards building cost-effective research teams irrespective of the geolocation of the experts and the size of the dataset. Previously, large datasets were not closely inspected for the large-scale distributions & relationships among the researchers, resulting in the algorithms failing to scale well on the data. Therefore, this paper presents a novel TF algorithm for expert team formation called SSR-TF based on two metrics; communication cost and graph reduction, that will become a basis for future TF's. In SSR-TF, communication cost finds the possibility of collaboration between researchers. The graph reduction scales the large data to only appropriate skills and the experts, resulting in real-time extraction of experts for collaboration. This approach is tested on five organic and benchmark datasets, i.e., UMP, DBLP, ACM, IMDB, and Bibsonomy. The SSR-TF algorithm is able to build cost-effective teams with the most appropriate experts-resulting in the formation of more communicative teams with high expertise levels.

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms*
  • Computer Graphics
  • Computer Heuristics
  • Cooperative Behavior*
  • Databases, Factual
  • Humans
  • Motion Pictures
  • Social Networking*

Grants and funding

The authors received no specific funding for this work.