Online social systems are multiplex in nature as multiple links may exist between the same two users across different social networks. In this work, we introduce a framework for studying links and interactions between users beyond the individual social network. Exploring the cross-section of two popular online platforms - Twitter and location-based social network Foursquare - we represent the two together as a composite multilayer online social network. Through this paradigm we study the interactions of pairs of users differentiating between those with links on one or both networks. We find that users with multiplex links, who are connected on both networks, interact more and have greater neighbourhood overlap on both platforms, in comparison with pairs who are connected on just one of the social networks. In particular, the most frequented locations of users are considerably closer, and similarity is considerably greater among multiplex links. We present a number of structural and interaction features, such as the multilayer Adamic Adar coefficient, which are based on the extension of the concept of the node neighbourhood beyond the single network. Our evaluation, which aims to shed light on the implications of multiplexity for the link generation process, shows that multilayer features, constructed from properties across social networks, perform better than their single network counterparts in predicting links across networks. We propose that combining information from multiple networks in a multilayer configuration can provide new insights into user interactions on online social networks, and can significantly improve link prediction overall with valuable applications to social bootstrapping and friend recommendations.
The problem of link prediction was first introduced in the seminal work of @cite_2 and since then, has been applied in various network domains. For instance, in @cite_10 the authors exploit place features in location-based services to recommend friendships, and in @cite_6 a new model based on supervised random walks is proposed to predict new links in Facebook. Most of these works build on features that are endogenous to the system that hosts the social network of users. In our evaluation, however, we train and test on heterogeneous networks. In a similar spirit, the authors in @cite_25 show how using both location and social information from the same network significantly improves link prediction. Our approach differs in that it frames the link prediction task in the context of multilayer networks and empirically shows the relationship between two different systems - Foursquare and Twitter - by mining features from both. Before presenting our framework and analysis, we will next state the research questions we are interested in answering through this work.
@cite_10 @cite_25 @cite_6 @cite_2
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Link prediction systems have been largely adopted to recommend new friends in online social networks using data about social interactions. With the soaring adoption of location-based social services it becomes possible to take advantage of an additional source of information: the places people visit. In this paper we study the problem of designing a link prediction system for online location-based social networks. We have gathered extensive data about one of these services, Gowalla, with periodic snapshots to capture its temporal evolution. We study the link prediction space, finding that about 30 of new links are added among "place-friends", i.e., among users who visit the same places. We show how this prediction space can be made 15 times smaller, while still 66 of future connections can be discovered. Thus, we define new prediction features based on the properties of the places visited by users which are able to discriminate potential future links among them. Building on these findings, we describe a supervised learning framework which exploits these prediction features to predict new links among friends-of-friends and place-friends. Our evaluation shows how the inclusion of information about places and related user activity offers high link prediction performance. These results open new directions for real-world link recommendation systems on location-based social networks. The problem of predicting links or interactions between objects in a network, is an important task in network analysis. Along this line, link prediction between co-authors in a co-author network is a frequently studied problem. In most of these studies, authors are considered in a homogeneous network, .e., only one type of objects(author type) and one type of links (co-authorship) exist in the network. However, in a real bibliographic network, there are multiple types of objects ( .g., venues, topics, papers) and multiple types of links among these objects. In this paper, we study the problem of co-author relationship prediction in the heterogeneous bibliographic network, and a new methodology called, .e., meta path-based relationship prediction model, is proposed to solve this problem. First, meta path-based topological features are systematically extracted from the network. Then, a supervised model is used to learn the best weights associated with different topological features in deciding the co-author relationships. We present experiments on a real bibliographic network, the DBLP network, which show that metapath-based heterogeneous topological features can generate more accurate prediction results as compared to homogeneous topological features. In addition, the level of significance of each topological feature can be learned from the model, which is helpful in understanding the mechanism behind the relationship building. Predicting the occurrence of links is a fundamental problem in networks. In the link prediction problem we are given a snapshot of a network and would like to infer which interactions among existing members are likely to occur in the near future or which existing interactions are we missing. Although this problem has been extensively studied, the challenge of how to effectively combine the information from the network structure with rich node and edge attribute data remains largely open. We develop an algorithm based on Supervised Random Walks that naturally combines the information from the network structure with node and edge level attributes. We achieve this by using these attributes to guide a random walk on the graph. We formulate a supervised learning task where the goal is to learn a function that assigns strengths to edges in the network such that a random walker is more likely to visit the nodes to which new links will be created in the future. We develop an efficient training algorithm to directly learn the edge strength estimation function. Our experiments on the Facebook social graph and large collaboration networks show that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art unsupervised approaches as well as approaches that are based on feature extraction. Predicting the occurrence of links is a fundamental problem in networks. In the link prediction problem we are given a snapshot of a network and would like to infer which interactions among existing members are likely to occur in the near future or which existing interactions are we missing. Although this problem has been extensively studied, the challenge of how to effectively combine the information from the network structure with rich node and edge attribute data remains largely open. We develop an algorithm based on Supervised Random Walks that naturally combines the information from the network structure with node and edge level attributes. We achieve this by using these attributes to guide a random walk on the graph. We formulate a supervised learning task where the goal is to learn a function that assigns strengths to edges in the network such that a random walker is more likely to visit the nodes to which new links will be created in the future. We develop an efficient training algorithm to directly learn the edge strength estimation function. Our experiments on the Facebook social graph and large collaboration networks show that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art unsupervised approaches as well as approaches that are based on feature extraction.