In this paper, we study the problem of Team Member Replacement: given a team
of people embedded in a social network working on the same task, find a good
candidate who can fit in the team after one team member becomes unavailable. We
conjecture that a good team member replacement should have good skill matching
as well as good structure matching. We formulate this problem using the concept
of graph kernel. To tackle the computational challenges, we propose a family of
fast algorithms by (a) designing effective pruning strategies, and (b)
exploring the smoothness between the existing and the new team structures. We
conduct extensive experimental evaluations on real world datasets to
demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency. Our algorithms (a) perform
significantly better than the alternative choices in terms of both precision
and recall; and (b) scale sub-linearly.Comment: Initially submitted to KDD 201