Relationship strength estimation for online social networks with the study on Facebook

Abstract

Online social network has become a popular way for users to express themselves, connect and share information with each other. However, in online social networks, the connections between different users are all in binary status, which neglects the relationship strengths between them. Meanwhile, the relationship strength between different users is activity field specific. In different activity fields, such as traveling, shopping, and sport, the relationship strengths between the same users may vary significantly. Therefore, in this paper we propose a general framework to measure the relationship strengths between different users, taking consideration not only the user's profile information but also the interaction activities and the activity fields. We conduct the experiments on Facebook dataset and the results show that the proposed framework is promising and can be used to improve the performances of various applications. © 2012 Elsevier B.V..