Modeling relationship strength in online social networks

  • Authors:
  • Rongjing Xiang;Jennifer Neville;Monica Rogati

  • Affiliations:
  • Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA;Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA;LinkedIn, Mountain View, CA, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 19th international conference on World wide web
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

Previous work analyzing social networks has mainly focused on binary friendship relations. However, in online social networks the low cost of link formation can lead to networks with heterogeneous relationship strengths (e.g., acquaintances and best friends mixed together). In this case, the binary friendship indicator provides only a coarse representation of relationship information. In this work, we develop an unsupervised model to estimate relationship strength from interaction activity (e.g., communication, tagging) and user similarity. More specifically, we formulate a link-based latent variable model, along with a coordinate ascent optimization procedure for the inference. We evaluate our approach on real-world data from Facebook and LinkedIn, showing that the estimated link weights result in higher autocorrelation and lead to improved classification accuracy.