Community detection is one of the preeminent topics in network analysis. Communities in real-world networks vary in their characteristics, such as their internal cohesion and size. Despite a large variety of methods proposed to detect communities so far, most of existing approaches fall into the category of global approaches. Specifically, these global approaches adapt their detection model focusing on approximating the global structure of the whole network, instead of performing approximation at the communities level. Global techniques tune their parameters to "one size fits all" model, so they are quite successful with extracting communities in homogeneous cases but suffer in heterogeneous community size distributions.

In this paper, we present a stateful diffusion approach (Stad) for community detection that employs diffusion. Stad boosts diffusion with conductance-based function that acts like a tuning parameter to control the diffusion speed. In contrast to existing diffusion mechanisms which operate with global and fixed speed, Stad introduces stateful diffusion to treat every community individually. Particularly, Stad controls the diffusion speed at node level, such that each node determines the diffusion speed associated with every possible community membership independently. Thus, Stad is able to extract communities more accurately in heterogeneous cases by dropping "one size fits all" model. Furthermore, Stad employs a vertex-centric approach which is fully decentralized and highly scalable, and requires no global knowledge. So as, Stad can be successfully applied in distributed environments, such as large-scale graph processing or decentralized machine learning. The results with both real-world and synthetic datasets show that Stad outperforms the state-of-the-art techniques, not only in the community size scale issue but also by achieving higher accuracy that is twice the accuracy achieved by the state-of-the-art techniques.

In the past years, researchers developed approaches to detect spam in Online Social Networks (OSNs) such as URL blacklisting, spam traps and even crowdsourcing for manual classification. Although previous work has shown the effectiveness of using statistical learning to detect spam, existing work employs supervised schemes that require labeled training data. In addition to the heavy training cost, it is difficult to obtain a comprehensive source of ground truth for measurement. In contrast to existing work, in this paper we present AdaGraph that is a novel graph-based approach for spam detection. AdaGraph is unsupervised, hence it diminishes the need of labeled training data and training cost. Particularly, AdaGraph effectively detects spam in large-scale OSNs by analyzing user behaviors using graph clustering technique. Moreover, AdaGraph continuously updates detected communities to comply with users dynamic interactions and activities. Extensive experiments using Twitter datasets show that AdaGraph detects spam with accuracy 92.3%. Furthermore, the false positive rate of AdaGraph is less than 0.3% that is less than half of the rate achieved by the state-of-the-art approaches.

In the last decade, researchers and the open source community have proposed various Decentralized Online Social Networks (DOSNs) that remove dependency on centralized online social network providers to preserve user privacy. However, transitioning from centralized to decentralized environment creates various new set of problems, such as adversarial manipulations. In this paper, we present DLSAS, a novel unsupervised and decentralized anti-spam framework for DOSNs. DLSAS provides decentralized spam detection that is resilient to adversarial attacks. DLSAS typifies massively parallel frameworks and exploits fully decentralized learning and cooperative approaches. Furthermore, DLSAS provides a novel defense mechanism for DOSNs to prevent malicious nodes participating in the system by creating a validation overlay to assess the credibility of the exchanged information among the participating nodes and exclude the misbehaving nodes from the system. Extensive experiments using Twitter datasets confirm not only the DLSAS's capability to detect spam with higher accuracy compared to state-of-the-art approaches, but also the DLSAS's robustness against different adversarial attacks.

Online Social Networks exploit a lightweight process to identify their users so as to facilitate their fast adoption. However, such convenience comes at the price of making legitimate users subject to different threats created by fake accounts. Therefore, there is a crucial need to empower users with tools helping them in assigning a level of trust to whomever they interact with. To cope with this issue, in this paper we introduce a novel model, DIVa, that leverages on mining techniques to find correlations among user profile attributes. These correlations are discovered not from user population as a whole, but from individual communities, where the correlations are more pronounced. DIVa exploits a decentralized learning approach and ensures privacy preservation as each node in the OSN independently processes its local data and is required to know only its direct neighbors. Extensive experiments using real-world OSN datasets show that DIVa is able to extract fine-grained community-aware correlations among profile attributes with average improvements up to 50% than the global approach.

Online social networks (OSNs) have successfully changed the way people interact. Online interactions among people span geographical boundaries and interweave with different human life activities. However, current OSNs identification schemes lack guarantees on quantifying the trustworthiness of online identities of users joining them. Therefore, driven from the need to empower users with an identity validation scheme, we introduce a novel model, cooperative and adaptive decentralized identity validation CADIVa, that allows OSN users to assign trust levels to whomever they interact with. CADIVa exploits association rule mining approach to extract the identity correlations among profile attributes in every individual community in a social network. CADIVa is a fully decentralized and adaptive model that exploits fully decentralized learning and cooperative approaches not only to preserve users privacy, but also to increase the system reliability and to make it resilient to mono-failure. CADIVa follows the ensemble learning paradigm to preserve users privacy and employs gossip protocols to achieve efficient and low-overhead communication. We provide two different implementation scenarios of CADIVa. Results confirm CADIVa's ability to provide fine-grained community-aware identity validation with average improvement up to 36 and 50 % compared to the semi-centralized or global approaches, respectively.