Corporate Leaders Analytics and Network System (CLANS): Constructing and Mining Social Networks among Corporations and Business Elites in China

Social network plays a vital role in Chinese business and is highly valued by business people. However, social network analysis is difficult due to issues in data collection, natural language processing, social network detection and construction, relationship mining, etc. Thus, we develop the Corporate Leaders Analytics and Network System (CLANS) to tackle some of these problems. Our contributions are in three aspects: 1) we collect data from multiple sources and do the preprocessing to make it available to use; 2) we construct a business social network and formulate the similarity relations among individuals and corporations; 3) we conduct further data mining to discover more implicit information, including important entities finding, relation mining and shortest path finding. In this paper, we present the overview of CLANS and specifically address these three major issues. We have made an operational system and achieved basic functionalities.