Predicting Social Links for New Users across Aligned Heterogeneous Social Networks

Online social networks have gained great success in recent years and many of them involve multiple kinds of nodes and complex relationships. Among these relationships, social links among users are of great importance. Many existing link prediction methods focus on predicting social links that will appear in the future among all users based upon a snapshot of the social network. In real-world social networks, many new users are joining in the service every day. Predicting links for new users are more important. Different from conventional link prediction problems, link prediction for new users are more challenging due to the following reasons: (1) differences in information distributions between new users and the existing active users (i.e., old users); (2) lack of information from the new users in the network. We propose a link prediction method called SCAN-PS (Supervised Cross Aligned Networks link prediction with Personalized Sampling), to solve the link prediction problem for new users with information transferred from both the existing active users in the target network and other source networks through aligned accounts. We proposed a within-target-network personalized sampling method to process the existing active users' information in order to accommodate the differences in information distributions before the intra-network knowledge transfer. SCAN-PS can also exploit information in other source networks, where the user accounts are aligned with the target network. In this way, SCAN-PS could solve the cold start problem when information of these new users is total absent in the target network.Comment: 11 pages, 10 figures, 4 table

BL-MNE: Emerging Heterogeneous Social Network Embedding through Broad Learning with Aligned Autoencoder

Network embedding aims at projecting the network data into a low-dimensional feature space, where the nodes are represented as a unique feature vector and network structure can be effectively preserved. In recent years, more and more online application service sites can be represented as massive and complex networks, which are extremely challenging for traditional machine learning algorithms to deal with. Effective embedding of the complex network data into low-dimension feature representation can both save data storage space and enable traditional machine learning algorithms applicable to handle the network data. Network embedding performance will degrade greatly if the networks are of a sparse structure, like the emerging networks with few connections. In this paper, we propose to learn the embedding representation for a target emerging network based on the broad learning setting, where the emerging network is aligned with other external mature networks at the same time. To solve the problem, a new embedding framework, namely "Deep alIgned autoencoder based eMbEdding" (DIME), is introduced in this paper. DIME handles the diverse link and attribute in a unified analytic based on broad learning, and introduces the multiple aligned attributed heterogeneous social network concept to model the network structure. A set of meta paths are introduced in the paper, which define various kinds of connections among users via the heterogeneous link and attribute information. The closeness among users in the networks are defined as the meta proximity scores, which will be fed into DIME to learn the embedding vectors of users in the emerging network. Extensive experiments have been done on real-world aligned social networks, which have demonstrated the effectiveness of DIME in learning the emerging network embedding vectors.Comment: 10 pages, 9 figures, 4 tables. Full paper is accepted by ICDM 2017, In: Proceedings of the 2017 IEEE International Conference on Data Mining