Abstract
Friend recommendation (FR) in social networks has been widely studied in recent years, which mainly focuses on social relationships and user interests. Friend of Friend method is one representative. However, the disadvantage is that most of existing solutions ignored other valuable information, such as user profile, location, influence and indirect trust. In fact, being friends among users is either determined by one or two dominant factors that originate from varying information sources, or the results of multiple main factors gaming. Motivated by the observations above, we propose a scalable FR framework in social networks, where multiple sources have been integrated based on improved D-S evidence theory. More specifically, we first analyzed 7 valuable information sources and categorized them into three classes, including Personal Features, Network Structure Features and Social Features. Furthermore, we also propose a fusion recommendation framework based on D-S evidence theory which embodies the minimal conflicts among evidences. In the proposed method, we first optimize the framework by importance degree and reliability of evidence based on original D-S evidence theory. Then, we designed a novel BPA evidence function by quantifying the evidence, where each evidence measures the relevance of forming friends among users. Finally, we describe the fusion FR algorithm plugged into our recommendation framework. The experiments on real-world dataset show that our proposed approach outperforms the other state-of-the-art algorithms on five evaluation metrics. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of fusing multi-source information for FR in social networks.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
http://weibo.com/, a famous Chinese microblog web site which has far more than one hundred million users.
http://t.qq.com/, another well-known Chinese microblog web site analogue to Sina Weibo.
References
Burke M, Marlow C, Lento T (2010) Social network activity and social well-being. In: Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on human factors in computing systems. ACM, New York, pp 1909–1912
Trusov M, Bucklin RE, Pauwels K (2009) Effects of word-of-mouth versus traditional marketing: findings from an internet social networking site. J Mark 73(5):90–102
Mochón MC (2016) Social network analysis and big data tools applied to the systemic risk supervision. IJIMAI 3(6):34–37
Bakshy E, Rosenn I, Marlow C et al (2012) The role of social networks in information diffusion. In: Proceedings of the 21st international conference on World Wide Web. ACM, New York, pp 519–528
He C, Li H, Fei X et al (2016) A topic community-based method for friend recommendation in large-scale online social networks. Practice and Experience, Concurrency and Computation
Tang J, Hu X, Liu H (2013) Social recommendation: a review. Soc Netw Anal Min 3(4):1113–1133
Adomavicius G, Tuzhilin A (2005) Toward the next generation of recommender systems: a survey of the state-of-the-art and possible extensions. IEEE Trans Knowl Data Eng 17(6):734–749
Linden G, Smith B, York J (2003) Amazon.com recommendations: Item-to-item collaborative filtering. Internet Comput IEEE 7(1):76–80
Sanjuan-Martinez O, G-Bustelo BCP, Crespo RG et al (2009) Using recommendation system for e-learning environments at degree level. Int J Interact Multimed Artif Intell 1(2):67–70
Ricci F, Rokach L, Shapira B (2011) Introduction to recommender systems handbook. Recommender systems handbook. Springer, New York, 1–35
Liu NN, He L, Zhao M (2013) Social temporal collaborative ranking for context aware movie recommendation. ACM Trans Intell Syst Technol (TIST) 4(1):15
Yang X, Guo Y, Liu Y et al (2014) A survey of collaborative filtering based social recommender systems. Comput Commun 41:1–10
Li W, Ye Z, Xin M et al (2015) Social recommendation based on trust and influence in SNS environments. Multimed Tools Appl:1–18
Gong NZ, Talwalkar A, Mackey L et al (2014) Joint link prediction and attribute inference using a social-attribute network. ACM Trans Intell Syst Technol (TIST) 5(2):27
Yin Z, Gupta M, Weninger T et al (2010) A unified framework for link recommendation using random walks. Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM), 2010 International Conference on. IEEE, pp 152–159
Adamic LA, Adar E (2003) Friends and neighbors on the web. Soc Netw 25(3):211–230
Agarwal V, Bharadwaj KK (2013) A collaborative filtering framework for friends recommendation in social networks based on interaction intensity and adaptive user similarity. Soc Netw Anal Min 3(3):359–379
Tang F, Zhang B, Zheng J et al (2013) Friend Recommendation Based on the Similarity of Micro-blog User Model. Green Computing and Communications (GreenCom), 2013 IEEE and Internet of Things (iThings/CPSCom), IEEE International Conference on and IEEE Cyber, Physical and Social Computing. IEEE, pp 2200–2204
Golbeck J, Hendler J (2006) Inferring binary trust relationships in web-based social networks. ACM Trans Internet Technol 6(4):497–529
Pazzani MJ (1999) A framework for collaborative, content-based and demographic filtering. Artif Intell Rev 13(5–6):393–408
Said A, Plumbaum T, De Luca EW et al (2011) A comparison of how demographic data affects recommendation. User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization (UMAP)
Kempe D, Kleinberg J, Tardos É (2003) Maximizing the spread of influence through a social network. In: Proceedings of the Ninth ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. ACM, pp 137–146
Nepal S, Paris C, Pour PA et al (2013) A social trust based friend recommender for online communities “invited paper”. In: Collaborative Computing: Networking, Applications and Worksharing (Collaboratecom), 2013 9th International Conference on. IEEE, pp 419–428
Martinez-Cruz C, Porcel C, Bernabé-Moreno J et al (2015) A model to represent users trust in recommender systems using ontologies and fuzzy linguistic modeling. Inf Sci 311:102–118
Guo D, Xu J, Zhang J et al (2017) User relationship strength modeling for friend recommendation on Instagram. Neurocomputing 239:9–18
Zhang Z, Liu Y, Ding W et al (2015) Proposing a new friend recommendation method, FRUTAI, to enhance social media providers’ performance. Decis Support Syst 79:46–54
Lü L, Zhou T (2011) Link prediction in complex networks: A survey. Phys A Stat Mech Appl 390(6):1150–1170
Getoor L, Diehl CP (2005) Link mining: a survey. ACM SIGKDD Explor Newsl 7(2):3–12
Clauset A, Moore C, Newman MEJ (2008) Hierarchical structure and the prediction of missing links in networks. Nature 453(7191):98–101
Liu W, Lü L (2010) Link prediction based on local random walk. EPL 89(5):58007
Chen J, Geyer W, Dugan C et al (2009) Make new friends, but keep the old: recommending people on social networking sites. In: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, New York, pp 201–210
Liben-Nowell D, Kleinberg J (2007) The link-prediction problem for social networks. J Am Soc Inf Sci Technol 58(7):1019–1031
Yang SH, Long B, Smola A et al (2011) Like like alike: joint friendship and interest propagation in social networks. In: Proceedings of the 20th international conference on World Wide Web. ACM, New York, pp 537–546
Yu Z, Wang C, Bu J et al (2015) Friend recommendation with content spread enhancement in social networks. Inf Sci 309:102–118
Brin S, Page L (2012) Reprint of: The anatomy of a large-scale hypertextual web search engine. Comput Netw 56(18):3825–3833
Konstas I, Stathopoulos V, Jose JM (2009) On social networks and collaborative recommendation. In: Proceedings of the 32nd international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval. ACM, New York, pp 195–202
Ahmed NM, Chen L (2016) An efficient algorithm for link prediction in temporal uncertain social networks. Inf Sci 331:120–136
Cui L, Dong L, Fu X et al (2017) A video recommendation algorithm based on the combination of video content and social network. Concurr Comput Pract Exp 29(14)
Jamali M, Ester M (2010) A matrix factorization technique with trust propagation for recommendation in social networks. In: Proceedings of the fourth ACM conference on Recommender systems. ACM, pp 135–142
Ma H, King I, Lyu MR (2009) Learning to recommend with social trust ensemble. In: Proceedings of the 32nd international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval. ACM, New York, pp 203–210
Agarwal V, Bharadwaj KK (2011) Trust-enhanced recommendation of friends in web based social networks using genetic algorithms to learn user preferences. In: Trends in Computer Science, Engineering and Information Technology. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, pp 476–485
Ma Y, Yu Z, Ding JA (2014) Method of user recommendation in social networks based on trust relationship and topic similarity. Social media processing. Springer, Berlin, pp 240–251
Agarwal V, Bharadwaj KK (2014) Friends recommendations in dynamic social networks. Encycl Soc Netw Anal Min:553–562
Victor P, Cornelis C, De Cock M et al (2011) Practical aggregation operators for gradual trust and distrust. Fuzzy Sets Syst 184(1):126–147
Bao J, Zheng Y, Wilkie D et al (2013) A survey on recommendations in location-based social networks. ACM Transaction on Intelligent Systems and Technology, New York
Wang Y, Wang X, Zuo W-L (2014) Trust prediction modeling based on social theories. J Softw (Chin) 25(12):2893–2904
Milgram S (1967) The small world problem. Psychol Today 2(1):60–67
Shafer G (1976) A mathematical theory of evidence. Princeton university press, Princeton
Telmoudi A, Chakhar S (2004) Data fusion application from evidential databases as a support for decision making. Inf Softw Technol 46(8):547–555
Dempster AP (1967) Upper and lower probabilities induced by a multivalued mapping. Ann Math Stat 38:325–339
Khaleghi B, Khamis A, Karray FO et al (2013) Multisensor data fusion: a review of the state-of-the-art. Inf Fusion 14(1):28–44
Wei D, Deng X, Zhang X et al (2013) Identifying influential nodes in weighted networks based on evidence theory. Phys A Stat Mech Appl 392(10):2564–2575
Ellison NB (2007) Social network sites: Definition, history, and scholarship. J Comput Mediat Commun 13(1):210–230
Yong D, WenKang S, ZhenFu Z et al (2004) Combining belief functions based on distance of evidence. Decis Support Syst 38(3):489–493
Gong NZ, Xu W, Huang L et al (2012) Evolution of social-attribute networks: measurements, modeling, and implications using google+. In: Proceedings of the 2012 Internet Measurement Conference. ACM, pp 131–144
Li Y, McLean D, Bandar Z et al (2006) Sentence similarity based on semantic nets and corpus statistics. Knowl Data Eng IEEE Trans 18(8):1138–1150
DeScioli P, Kurzban R, Koch EN et al (2011) Best friends alliances, friend ranking, and the myspace social network. Perspect Psychol Sci 6(1):6–8
Liben-Nowell D, Novak J, Kumar R et al (2005) Geographic routing in social networks. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 102(33):11623–11628
Sui X, Chen Z, Ma J (2015) Location sensitive friend recommendation in social network. Web technologies and applications. Springer International Publishing, New York, pp 316–327
Scellato S, Noulas A, Lambiotte R et al (2011) Socio-spatial properties of online location-based social networks. ICWSM 11:329–336
Wu M, Wang Z, Sun H et al (2016) Friend Recommendation Algorithm for Online Social Networks Based on Location Preference. Information Science and Control Engineering (ICISCE), 3rd International Conference on. IEEE, 2016: 379–385
Li Q, Zheng Y, Xie X et al (2008) Mining user similarity based on location history. In: Proceedings of the 16th ACM SIGSPATIAL international conference on Advances in geographic information systems. ACM, New York, p 34
Zheng Y, Zhou X (2011) Computing with spatial trajectories. Springer Science & Business Media, New York
Xiao X, Zheng Y, Luo Q et al (2014) Inferring social ties between users with human location history. J Ambient Intell Humaniz Comput 5(1):3–19
Moreno A, Redondo T (2016) Text analytics: the convergence of big data and artificial intelligence. IJIMAI 3(6):57–64
Gruber TR (1993) A translation approach to portable ontology specifications. Knowl Acquis 5(2):199–220
Natalya FN, Deborah LM (2001) Ontology development 101: a guide to creating your first ontology. Stanford Knowledge Systems Laboratory Technical Report KSL-01-05 and Stanford Medical Informatics Technical Report SMI-2001-0880
Zheng J, Zhang B, Yue X et al (2015) Neighborhood-user profiling based on perception relationship in the micro-blog scenario. Web Semant Sci Serv Agents World Wide Web 34:13–26
Cha M, Haddadi H, Benevenuto F et al (2010) Measuring User Influence in Twitter: The Million Follower Fallacy. ICWSM 10(10–17):30
Golbeck J (2005) Computing and applying trust in web-based social networks. University of Maryland, Maryland
Victor P, Verbiest N, Cornelis C et al (2013) Enhancing the trust-based recommendation process with explicit distrust. ACM Trans Actions Web (TWEB) 7(2):6
Luo H, Niu C, Shen R et al (2008) A collaborative filtering framework based on both local user similarity and global user similarity. Mach Learn 72(3):231–245
Avnit A (2009) The million followers fallacy. Pravda Media Group, Tel Aviv
Verbiest N, Cornelis C, Victor P et al (2012) Trust and distrust aggregation enhanced with path length incorporation. Fuzzy Sets Syst 202:61–74
Shani G, Gunawardana A (2011) Evaluating recommendation systems. Recommender systems handbook. Springer, New York, pp 257–297
Weimer M, Karatzoglou A, Le QV et al (2008) Cofi rank-maximum margin matrix factorization for collaborative ranking. In: Advances in neural information processing systems, pp 1593–1600
Chakrabarti S, Khanna R, Sawant U et al (2008) Structured learning for non-smooth ranking losses. In: Proceedings of the 14th ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery and data mining. ACM, pp 88–96
Järvelin K, Kekäläinen J (2000) IR evaluation methods for retrieving highly relevant documents. In: Proceedings of the 23rd annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval. ACM, pp 41–48
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank all of the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and useful suggestions that must lead to a much higher quality of our manuscript. This work was partially supported by the Outstanding Young Talents Program in colleges and universities of Anhui Province (Grant No. gxyqZD2018060).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding authors
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Cheng, S., Zhang, B., Zou, G. et al. Friend recommendation in social networks based on multi-source information fusion. Int. J. Mach. Learn. & Cyber. 10, 1003–1024 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13042-017-0778-1
Received:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13042-017-0778-1