大规模社交网络中高效的关键用户选取方法

针对大规模社交网络及其用户发布消息的历史数据,如何快速有效地选取具有较强信息传播能力的关键用户,提出了一种关键用户选取方法。首先,利用社交网络的结构信息,构建以用户为节点的有向图,利用用户发布消息的历史数据,基于Spark计算框架,定量计算由用户活跃度、转发交互度和信息量占比刻画的权重,从而构建社交网络的有向带权图模型;然后,借鉴PageRank算法,建立用户信息传播能力的度量机制,给出基于Spark的大规模社交网络中用户信息传播能力的计算方法;进而,给出基于Spark的d-距选取算法,通过多次迭代,使得所选取的不同关键用户的信息传播范围尽量少地重叠。建立在新浪微博数据上的实验结果表明,所提方法具有高效性、可行性和可扩展性,对于控制不良突发信息传播、社交网络舆情监控具有一定的支撑作用。     

Relationship Identification Across Heterogeneous Online Social Networks

In the era of the social web, many people manage their social relationships through various online social networking services. It has been found that identifying the types of social relationships among users in online social networks facilitates the marketing of products via electronic “word of mouth.” However, it is a great challenge to identify the types of social relationships, given very limited information in a social network. In this article, we study how to identify the types of relationships across multiple heterogeneous social networks and examine if combining certain information from different social networks can help improve the identification accuracy. The main contribution of our research is that we develop a novel decision tree initiated random walk model, which takes into account both global network structure and local user behavior to bootstrap the performance of relationship identification. Experiments conducted based on two real‐world social networks, Sina Weibo and Jiepang, demonstrate that the proposed model achieves an average accuracy of 92.0%, significantly outperforming other baseline methods. Our experiments also confirm the effectiveness of combining information from multiple social networks. Moreover, our results reveal that human mobility features indicating location categories, coincidence, and check‐in patterns are among the most discriminative features for relationship identification.     

Better the devil you know: Inter-organizational information technology and network social capital in coopetition networks

By enabling more efficient information and knowledge sharing and reinforcing the shared goals for participating members, inter-organizational information technology (IT) becomes instrumental to both accomplishing coopetitive outcomes and avoiding the pitfalls of partner opportunism. We posit that as network social capital is accumulated in technology-enabled coopetition networks, collaboration will enhance the strategic value of outcomes and positively affect goal convergence among network users. Our findings illustrate that the role of technology in coopetition extends beyond facilitating knowledge exchange and may play a vital role in the strategic development of firms pursuing coopetitive options.     

Incremental community miner for dynamic networks

Human relationships have led to complex communication networks among different individuals in a society. As the nature of relationship is change, these networks will change over the time too which makes them dynamic networks including several consecutive snapshots. Nowadays, the pervasiveness of electronic communication networks, so called Social Networks, has facilitated obtaining this valuable communication information and highlighted as one of the most interesting researchers in the field of data mining, called social network mining. One of the most challenging issues in the field of social network mining is community detection. It means to detect hidden communities in a social network based on the available information. This study proposes an appropriate solution to find and track communities in a dynamic social network based on the local information. Our approach tries to detect communities by finding initial kernels and maintaining them in the next snapshots. Using well-known datasets, the investigation and comparison of the proposed method with some state-of-the-art approaches indicates that the performance and computation complexity of our method is promising and can outperform its competitors.     

A high-performance algorithm for finding influential nodes in large-scale social networks

As one of the significant issues in social networks analysis, the influence maximization problem aims to fetch a minimal set of the most influential individuals in the network to maximize the number of influenced nodes under a diffusion model. Several approaches have been proposed to tackle this NP-hard problem. The traditional approaches failed to develop an efficient and effective solution due to the exponential growth of the size of social networks (due to massive computational overhead). In this paper, a three-stage framework based on the community detection approach is devised, namely LGFIM. In the first stage, the search space was controlled by partitioning the network into communities. Simultaneously, three heuristic methods were presented for modifying the community detection algorithm to extract the optimal communities: core nodes selection, capacity constraint on communities, and communities combination. These extracted communities were highly compatible with the information propagation mechanism. The next stages apply a scalable and robust algorithm at two different levels of the network: 1. Exploring the local scope of communities to select the most influential nodes of each community and construct the potential influential nodes set 2. Exploring the global scope of the network to select the target influential nodes among potential influential nodes set. Experimental results on various real datasets proved that LGFIM could achieve remarkable results compared with the state-of-the-art algorithms, especially acceptable influence spread, much better running time, and more applicable to massive social networks.

     

代价约束下基于随机游走的负影响力传播抑制方法

在社交网络的信息传播机制中,不同用户之间信息扩散往往会受到用户之间影响力的影响,因此开展复杂网络分析研究显得格外必要.首先研究在代价约束下,社交网络的影响力传播模型,在未知网络传播原理的情况下,研究如何利用叠加的随机游走策略对网络的影响力传播进行度量,将影响力传播的范围控制在某一子图中,设计出抑制负影响力传播的有效方法...     

Peri-Watchdog: Hunting for hidden botnets in the periphery of online social networks

In order to evade detection of ever-improving defense techniques, modern botnet masters are constantly looking for new communication platforms for delivering C&C (Command and Control) information. Attracting their attention is the emergence of online social networks such as Twitter, as the information dissemination mechanism provided by these networks can naturally be exploited for spreading botnet C&C information, and the enormous amount of normal communications co-existing in these networks makes it a daunting task to tease out botnet C&C messages.Against this backdrop, we explore graph-theoretic techniques that aid effective monitoring of potential botnet activities in large open online social networks. Our work is based on extensive analysis of a Twitter dataset that contains more than 40 million users and 1.4 billion following relationships, and mine patterns from the Twitter network structure that can be leveraged for improving efficiency of botnet monitoring. Our analysis reveals that the static Twitter topology contains a small-sized core sugraph, after removing which, the Twitter network breaks down into small connected components, each of which can be handily monitored for potential botnet activities. Based on this observation, we propose a method called Peri-Watchdog, which computes the core of a large online social network and derives the set of nodes that are likely to pass botnet C&C information in the periphery of online social network. We analyze the time complexity of Peri-Watchdog under its normal operations. We further apply Peri-Watchdog on the Twitter graph injected with synthetic botnet structures and investigate the effectiveness of Peri-Watchdog in detecting potential C&C information from these botnets.To verify whether patterns observed from the static Twitter graph are common to other online social networks, we analyze another online social network dataset, BrightKite, which contains evolution of social graphs formed by its users in half a year. We show not only that there exists a similarly relatively small core in the BrightKite network, but also this core remains stable over the course of BrightKite evolution. We also find that to accommodate the dynamic growth of BrightKite, the core has to be updated about every 18 days under a constrained monitoring capacity.     

Private discovery of common social contacts

Digital services that are offered, and consumed, on the basis of social relationships form the backbone of social clouds—an emerging new concept that finds its roots in online social networks. The latter have already taken an essential role in people’s daily life, helping users to build and reflect their social relationships to other participants. A key step in establishing new links entails the reconciliation of shared contacts and friends. However, for many individuals, personal relationships belong to the private sphere, and, as such, should be concealed from potentially prying eyes of strangers. Consequently, the transition toward social clouds cannot set aside mechanisms to control the disclosure of social links. This paper motivates and introduces the concept of Private Discovery of Common Social Contacts, which allows two users to assess their social proximity through interaction and learn the set of contacts (e.g., friends) that are common to both users, while hiding contacts that they do not share. We realize private contact discovery using a new cryptographic primitive, called contact discovery scheme (CDS), whose functionality and privacy is formalized in this work. To this end, we define a novel privacy feature, called contact-hiding, that captures our strong privacy goals. We also propose the concept of contact certification and show that it is essential to thwart impersonation attacks on social relationships. We build provably private and realistically efficient CDS protocols for private discovery of mutual contacts. Our constructions do not rely on a trusted third party (TTP)—all contacts are managed independently by the users. The practicality of our proposals is confirmed both analytically and experimentally on different computing platforms. We show that they can be efficiently deployed on smartphones, thus allowing ad hoc and ubiquitous contact discovery outside of existing social networks. Our CDS constructions allow users to select their (certified) contacts to be included in individual protocol executions. That is, users may perform context-dependent contact discovery using any subset (circle) of their contacts.     

A people-to-people matching system using graph mining techniques

A people-to-people matching system (or a match-making system) refers to a system in which users join with the objective of meeting other users with the common need. Some real-world examples of these systems are employer-employee (in job search networks), mentor-student (in university social networks), consume-to-consumer (in marketplaces) and male-female (in an online dating network). The network underlying in these systems consists of two groups of users, and the relationships between users need to be captured for developing an efficient match-making system. Most of the existing studies utilize information either about each of the users in isolation or their interaction separately, and develop recommender systems using the one form of information only. It is imperative to understand the linkages among the users in the network and use them in developing a match-making system. This study utilizes several social network analysis methods such as graph theory, small world phenomenon, centrality analysis, density analysis to gain insight into the entities and their relationships present in this network. This paper also proposes a new type of graph called “attributed bipartite graph”. By using these analyses and the proposed type of graph, an efficient hybrid recommender system is developed which generates recommendation for new users as well as shows improvement in accuracy over the baseline methods.     

Using Estimated Personality of Social Network Members for Finding Influential Nodes in Viral Marketing

Sending promotional messages to a few numbers of users in a social network can propagate a product through word of mouth. However, choosing users that receive promotional messages, in order to maximize propagation, is a considerable issue. These recipients are named “influential nodes.” To recognize influential nodes, according to the literature, criteria such as the relationships of network members or information shared by each member on a social network have been used. One of the effective factors in diffusion of messages is the personality characteristics of members. As far as we know, although this issue is considerable, so far it has not been applied in the previous studies. In this article, using the graph structure of social networks, two personality characteristics, openness and extroversion, are estimated for network members. Next, these two estimated characteristics together with other characteristics of social networks, are considered as the criteria of choosing influential nodes. To implement this process, the real coded genetic algorithm is used. The proposed method has been evaluated on a dataset including 1000 members of Twitter. Our results indicate that using the proposed method, compared with simple heuristic methods, can improve performance up to 37%.     

ML-SOR: Message routing using multi-layer social networks in opportunistic communications

Opportunistic networks are a generalization of DTNs in which disconnections are frequent and encounter patterns between mobile devices are unpredictable. In such scenarios, message routing is a fundamental issue. Social-based routing protocols usually exploit the social information extracted from the history of encounters between mobile devices to find an appropriate message relay. Protocols based on encounter history, however, take time to build up a knowledge database from which to take routing decisions. While contact information changes constantly and it takes time to identify strong social ties, other types of ties remain rather stable and could be exploited to augment available partial contact information. In this paper, we start defining a multi-layer social network model combining the social network detected through encounters with other social networks and investigate the relationship between these social network layers in terms of node centrality, community structure, tie strength and link prediction. The purpose of this analysis is to better understand user behavior in a multi-layered complex network combining online and offline social relationships. Then, we propose a novel opportunistic routing approach ML-SOR (Multi-layer Social Network based Routing) which extracts social network information from such a model to perform routing decisions. To select an effective forwarding node, ML-SOR measures the forwarding capability of a node when compared to an encountered node in terms of node centrality, tie strength and link prediction. Trace driven simulations show that a routing metric combining social information extracted from multiple social network layers allows users to achieve good routing performance with low overhead cost.     

Multi-relational reinforcement for computing credibility of nodes

Nowadays, growing number of social networks are available on the internet, with which users can conveniently make friends, share information, and exchange ideas with each other. As the result, large amount of data are generated from activities of those users. Such data are regarded as valuable resources to support different mining tasks, such as predicting friends for a user, ranking users in terms of their influence on the social network, or identifying communities with common interests. Traditional algorithms for those tasks are often designed under the assumption that a user selects another user as his friend based on their common interests. As a matter of fact, users on a social network may not always develop their friends with common interest. For example, a user may randomly select other users as his friends just in order to attract more links reversely from them. Therefore, such links may not indicate his influence. In this paper, we study the user rank problem in terms of their ‘real’ influences. For this sake, common interest relationships among users are established besides their friend relationships. Then, the credible trust link from one node to another is on account of their similarities, which means the more similar the two users, the more credible their trust relation. So the credibility of a node is high if its trust inlinks are credible enough. In this work, we propose a framework that computes the credibility of nodes on a multi-relational network using reinforcement techniques. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to assess credibility exploited knowledge on multi-relational social networks. The experimental results on real data sets show that our framework is effective.     

基于agent的多重社会网络中破产传染模型研究

社会网络中的信息扩散是目前国际上关注的研究方向,而破产传染作为社会金融中一类特殊而又重要的传播现象,也是当前社会经济领域非常关心的问题.然而,已有的金融传播研究中通常只基于单层的交互关系来分析传播行为,忽略了真实金融主体之间多重社会关系的交叉性.针对该问题,基于多智能体对多重社会网络中的破产传染现象进行建模,构建了纵向复合和并行独立多重网络传染模型,前者关注不同关系网络层次之间的跨层间影响,后者偏重于单层网络的独立性和并行性.设置不同的约束条件,对比实验了两种模型不同的传染效果特征.实验结果揭示了两种模型不同的适用范围:模型选择应由实验目标是否存在明显的不同社会网络层次间的相互影响决定,纵向复合多重网络破产传染模型更适用于社会网络层次之间间接影响明显的环境.     

基于边分割的社交网络敏感边保护技术

用户间的敏感关系是社交网络中用户的重要隐私信息。为了解决社交网络中用户间敏感关系泄露问题,提出一种边分割算法。首先,将已删除敏感边的简单匿名社交网络的非敏感边分割成多条子边;然后,将原非敏感边携带的信息分配到子边上,使得每条子边只携带原非敏感边的部分信息,从而生成具有隐私能力的匿名社交网络。理论分析和仿真实验结果表明,相比cluster-edge和cluster-based with constraints算法,边分割算法在保证数据具有较高可用性的情况下能更大限度降低敏感关系泄露的概率,泄露概率分别降低了约30%和20%,因此所提算法能够有效解决社交网络中敏感关系泄露问题。     

Design and performance evaluation of ContentPlace,a social-aware data dissemination system for opportunistic networks

In this paper we present and evaluate ContentPlace, a data dissemination system for opportunistic networks, i.e., mobile networks in which stable simultaneous multi-hop paths between communication endpoints cannot be provided. We consider a scenario in which users both produce and consume data objects. ContentPlace takes care of moving and replicating data objects in the network such that interested users receive them despite possible long disconnections, partitions, etc. Thanks to ContentPlace, data producers and consumers are completely decoupled, and might be never connected to the network at the same point in time. The key feature of ContentPlace is learning and exploiting information about the social behaviour of the users to drive the data dissemination process. This allows ContentPlace to be more efficient both in terms of data delivery and in terms of resource usage with respect to reference alternative solutions. The performance of ContentPlace is thoroughly investigated both through simulation and analytical models.     

The Impact of Geographic Distance on Online Social Interactions

Online social networking services entice millions of users to spend hours every day interacting with each other. The focus of this work is to explain the effect that geographic distance has on online social interactions and, simultaneously, to understand the interplay between the social characteristics of friendship ties and their spatial properties. We analyze data from a large-scale online social network, Tuenti, with about 10 million active users: our sample includes user profiles, user home locations and online social interactions among Tuenti members. Our findings support the idea that spatial distance constraints whom users interact with, but not the intensity of their social interactions. Furthermore, friendship ties belonging to denser connected groups tend to arise at shorter spatial distances than social ties established between members belonging to different groups. Finally, we show that our findings mostly do not depend on the age of the users, although younger users seem to be slightly more constrained to shorter geographic distances. Augmenting social structure with geographic information adds a new dimension to social network analysis and a large number of theoretical investigations and practical applications can be pursued for online social systems, with many promising outcomes. As the amount of available location-based data is increasing, our findings and results open the door to future possibilities: researchers would benefit from these insights when studying online social services, while developers should be aware of these additional possibilities when building systems and applications related to online social platforms.     

Community detection for emerging social networks

Many famous online social networks, e.g., Facebook and Twitter, have achieved great success in the last several years. Users in these online social networks can establish various connections via both social links and shared attribute information. Discovering groups of users who are strongly connected internally is defined as the community detection problem. Community detection problem is very important for online social networks and has extensive applications in various social services. Meanwhile, besides these popular social networks, a large number of new social networks offering specific services also spring up in recent years. Community detection can be even more important for new networks as high quality community detection results enable new networks to provide better services, which can help attract more users effectively. In this paper, we will study the community detection problem for new networks, which is formally defined as the “New Network Community Detection” problem. New network community detection problem is very challenging to solve for the reason that information in new networks can be too sparse to calculate effective similarity scores among users, which is crucial in community detection. However, we notice that, nowadays, users usually join multiple social networks simultaneously and those who are involved in a new network may have been using other well-developed social networks for a long time. With full considerations of network difference issues, we propose to propagate useful information from other well-established networks to the new network with efficient information propagation models to overcome the shortage of information problem. An effective and efficient method, Cat (Cold stArT community detector), is proposed in this paper to detect communities for new networks using information from multiple heterogeneous social networks simultaneously. Extensive experiments conducted on real-world heterogeneous online social networks demonstrate that Cat can address the new network community detection problem effectively.