GDELT dataset
In order to validate our implementation, we use the GDELT dataset we analyzed in the previous chapter. We extracted all of the communities and spent some time looking at the person names to see whether or not our community clustering was consistent. The full picture of the communities is reported in Figure 7 and has been realized using the Gephi software, where only the top few thousand connections have been imported:
We first observe that most of the communities we detected are totally aligned with the ones we could eyeball on a force-directed layout, giving a good confidence level about the algorithm accuracy.
The Bowie effect
Any well-defined community has been properly identified, and the less obvious ones are the ones surrounding highly connected vertices such as David Bowie. The name David Bowie being heavily mentioned in GDELT articles alongside so many different persons that, on that day of January 12, 2016, it became too large...