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International Conference on Social Informatics

SocInfo 2018: Social Informatics pp 471–486Cite as

Diversity of a User’s Friend Circle in OSNs and Its Use for Profiling

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 11185))

Abstract

In past studies, Online Social Networks (OSNs) is commonly assumed to build on triadic closure, implying that alters in a user’s ego network form either a single connected component, or a small number of connected components. In real-world OSNs, we find a significant number of users with a different ego network pattern consisting of a more diverse social circle with many friends not connected to each other. We conjecture this is caused by the increasing use of OSNs for functional (e.g. business or marketing) rather than traditional socializing activities. We refer to the resulting prototypical users as functional and social users respectively. In this paper, we use a manually tagged dataset (from Tencent social platform) to identify these two type of users and demonstrate their different friend circle patterns using examples. To help sort out functional users from social users, we develop metrics to measure diversity of a user’s friend circle, borrowing concepts from classic works on structural holes and community detection. We show how the different measures of diversity perform in classifying the two types of users. Then we combine the structural diversity measures and behavioral measures to train machine leaning models. We further study ego network diversity in groups of users with different demographics (profession, gender and age). Our results bring new insights to the heterogeneous nature of today’s OSNs and help better profile users. Our study also shed new light on structural hole theory and Dunbar’s number in the OSN context.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Information Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, Hong Kong

    Qiu Fang Ying & Dah Ming Chiu

  2. Data Application Center, Tencent Inc., Shenzhen, China

    Xiaopeng Zhang

Authors
  1. Qiu Fang Ying
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  2. Dah Ming Chiu
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  3. Xiaopeng Zhang
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Qiu Fang Ying .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Koblenz, Koblenz, Germany

    Steffen Staab

  2. National Research University Higher School of Economics, St. Petersburg, Russia

    Olessia Koltsova

  3. National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russia

    Dmitry I. Ignatov

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Ying, Q.F., Chiu, D.M., Zhang, X. (2018). Diversity of a User’s Friend Circle in OSNs and Its Use for Profiling. In: Staab, S., Koltsova, O., Ignatov, D. (eds) Social Informatics. SocInfo 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11185. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01129-1_29

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01129-1_29

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-01128-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-01129-1

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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