Segmentation and Automated Social Hierarchy Detection through Email Network Analysis

Germán Creamer, Ryan Rowe, Shlomo Hershkop, Salvatore J. Stolfo

Abstract: We present our work on automatically extracting social hierarchies from electronic communication data. Data mining based on user behavior can be leveraged to analyze and catalog patterns of communications between entities to rank relationships. The advantage is that the analysis can be done in an automatic fashion and can adopt itself to organizational changes over time. We illustrate the algorithms over real world data using the Enron corporation’s email archive. The results show great promise when compared to the corporations work chart and judicial proceeding analyzing the major players.