A comprehensive study on the effects of using data mining techniques to predict tie strength

The use of social networks has grown noticeably in recent years and this fact has led to the production of numerous volumes of data. Data that are widely used by users on the social media sites are very large, noisy, unstructured and dynamic. Providing a flexible framework and method to apply in all of these networks can be the perfect solution. The uncertainties arising from the complexity of decisions in recognition of the Tie Strength among people have led researchers to seek effective variables of intimacy among people. Since there are several effective variables which their effectiveness rate are not precisely determined and their relations are nonlinear and complex, using data mining techniques can be considered as one of the practical solutions for this problem. Some types of unsupervised mining methods have been conducted in the field of detecting the type of tie. Data mining could be considered as one of the applicable tools for researchers in exploring the relationships among users.In this paper, the problem of tie strength prediction is modeled as a data mining problem on which different supervised and unsupervised mining methods are applicable. We propose a comprehensive study on the effects of using different classification techniques such as decision trees, Naive Bayes and so on; in addition to some ensemble classification methods such as Bagging and Boosting methods for predicting tie strength of users of a social network. LinkedIn social network is used as a real case study and our experimental results are proposed on its extracted data. Several models, based on basic techniques and ensemble methods are created and their efficiencies are compared based on F-Measure, accuracy, and average executing time. Our experimental results show that, our profile-behavioral based model has much better accuracy in comparison with profile-data based models techniques.