Strengthening ties towards a highly-connected world
2022 (English)In: Data mining and knowledge discovery, ISSN 1384-5810, E-ISSN 1573-756X, Vol. 36, no 1, p. 448-476Article in journal (Refereed) Published
Abstract [en]
Online social networks provide a forum where people make new connections, learn more about the world, get exposed to different points of view, and access information that were previously inaccessible. It is natural to assume that content-delivery algorithms in social networks should not only aim to maximize user engagement but also to offer opportunities for increasing connectivity and enabling social networks to achieve their full potential. Our motivation and aim is to develop methods that foster the creation of new connections, and subsequently, improve the flow of information in the network. To achieve our goal, we propose to leverage the strong triadic closure principle, and consider violations to this principle as opportunities for creating more social links. We formalize this idea as an algorithmic problem related to the densest k-subgraph problem. For this new problem, we establish hardness results and propose approximation algorithms. We identify two special cases of the problem that admit a constant-factor approximation. Finally, we experimentally evaluate our proposed algorithm on real-world social networks, and we additionally evaluate some simpler but more scalable algorithms.
Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Springer Nature , 2022. Vol. 36, no 1, p. 448-476
Keywords [en]
Densest subgraph discovery, Link recommendations, STC, Strong triadic closure, Social networking (online), Contents deliveries, Dense sub-graphs, Dense subgraph discovery, Exposed to, Learn+, Link recommendation, Triadic closures, User engagement, Approximation algorithms
National Category
Computer Sciences Discrete Mathematics Business Administration
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:kth:diva-318407DOI: 10.1007/s10618-021-00812-1ISI: 000738439600003PubMedID: 35125932Scopus ID: 2-s2.0-85122299182OAI: oai:DiVA.org:kth-318407DiVA, id: diva2:1697542
Note
QC 20220921
2022-09-212022-09-212025-01-27Bibliographically approved