Friendship prediction and homophily in social media

Luca Maria Aiello (1) , Alain Barrat (2, 3, 4, 5) , Rossano Schifanella (1) , C. Cattuto (3) , Benjamin Markines (6) , Filippo Menczer (3, 6)

1 UNITO - Università degli studi di Torino = University of Turin
2 CPT - E5 Physique statistique et systèmes complexes
3 ISI - Data Science Laboratory
4 CPT - Centre de Physique Théorique - UMR 6207
5 CPT - Centre de Physique Théorique - UMR 7332
6 School of Informatics and Computing, Indiana University [Bloomington]

Social media have attracted considerable attention because their open-ended nature allows users to create lightweight semantic scaffolding to organize and share content. To date, the interplay of the social and topical components of social media has been only partially explored. Here, we study the presence of homophily in three systems that combine tagging social media with online social networks. We find a substantial level of topical similarity among users who are close to each other in the social network. We introduce a null model that preserves user activity while removing local correlations, allowing us to disentangle the actual local similarity between users from statistical effects due to the assortative mixing of user activity and centrality in the social network. This analysis suggests that users with similar interests are more likely to be friends, and therefore topical similarity measures among users based solely on their annotation metadata should be predictive of social links. We test this hypothesis on several datasets, confirming that social networks constructed from topical similarity capture actual friendship accurately. When combined with topological features, topical similarity achieves a link prediction accuracy of about 92%.

Domaines: Web

Luca Maria Aiello, Alain Barrat, Rossano Schifanella, C. Cattuto, Benjamin Markines, et al.. Friendship prediction and homophily in social media. ACM Transactions on the Web, 2012, 6 (2), pp.9. ⟨10.1145/2180861.2180866⟩. ⟨hal-00718085⟩