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Who will follow you back?: reciprocal relationship prediction

Published: 24 October 2011 Publication History

Abstract

We study the extent to which the formation of a two-way relationship can be predicted in a dynamic social network. A two-way (called reciprocal) relationship, usually developed from a one-way (parasocial) relationship, represents a more trustful relationship between people. Understanding the formation of two-way relationships can provide us insights into the micro-level dynamics of the social network, such as what is the underlying community structure and how users influence each other. Employing Twitter as a source for our experimental data, we propose a learning framework to formulate the problem of reciprocal relationship prediction into a graphical model. The framework incorporates social theories into a machine learning model. We demonstrate that it is possible to accurately infer 90% of reciprocal relationships in a dynamic network. Our study provides strong evidence of the existence of the structural balance among reciprocal relationships. In addition, we have some interesting findings, e.g., the likelihood of two "elite" users creating a reciprocal relationships is nearly 8 times higher than the likelihood of two ordinary users. More importantly, our findings have potential implications such as how social structures can be inferred from individuals' behaviors.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    CIKM '11: Proceedings of the 20th ACM international conference on Information and knowledge management
    October 2011
    2712 pages
    ISBN:9781450307178
    DOI:10.1145/2063576
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 24 October 2011

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    Author Tags

    1. link prediction
    2. predictive model
    3. reciprocal relationship
    4. social influence
    5. social network
    6. twitter

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    • (2024)Range constrained group query on attribute social graphDistributed and Parallel Databases10.1007/s10619-024-07439-342:3(337-375)Online publication date: 30-Mar-2024
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