Petr Chunaev

Elizaveta Stavinova, Alexander Grigorievskiy, Anna Volodkevich et al.

This survey aims at providing a comprehensive overview of the recent trends in the field of modeling and simulation (M&S) of interactions between users and recommender systems and applications of the M&S to the performance improvement of industrial recommender engines. We start with the motivation behind the development of frameworks implementing the simulations -- simulators -- and the usage of them for training and testing recommender systems of different types (including Reinforcement Learning ones). Furthermore, we provide a new consistent classification of existing simulators based on their functionality, approbation, and industrial effectiveness and moreover make a summary of the simulators found in the research literature. Besides other things, we discuss the building blocks of simulators: methods for synthetic data (user, item, user-item responses) generation, methods for what-if experimental analysis, methods and datasets used for simulation quality evaluation (including the methods that monitor and/or close possible simulation-to-reality gaps), and methods for summarization of experimental simulation results. Finally, this survey considers emerging topics and open problems in the field.

Petr Chunaev

Community detection is a fundamental problem in social network analysis consisting in unsupervised dividing social actors (nodes in a social graph) with certain social connections (edges in a social graph) into densely knitted and highly related groups with each group well separated from the others. Classical approaches for community detection usually deal only with network structure and ignore features of its nodes (called node attributes), although many real-world social networks provide additional actors' information such as interests. It is believed that the attributes may clarify and enrich the knowledge about the actors and give sense to the communities. This belief has motivated the progress in developing community detection methods that use both the structure and the attributes of network (i.e. deal with a node-attributed graph) to yield more informative and qualitative results. During the last decade many such methods based on different ideas have appeared. Although there exist partial overviews of them, a recent survey is a necessity as the growing number of the methods may cause repetitions in methodology and uncertainty in practice. In this paper we aim at describing and clarifying the overall situation in the field of community detection in node-attributed social networks. Namely, we perform an exhaustive search of known methods and propose a classification of them based on when and how structure and attributes are fused. We not only give a description of each class but also provide general technical ideas behind each method in the class. Furthermore, we pay attention to available information which methods outperform others and which datasets and quality measures are used for their evaluation. Basing on the information collected, we make conclusions on the current state of the field and disclose several problems that seem important to be resolved in future.