Learning to Infer Social Ties in Large Networks

In online social networks, most relationships are lack of meaning labels (e.g., “colleague” and “intimate friends”), simply because users do not take the time to label them. An interesting question is: can we automatically infer the type of social relationships in a large network? what are the fundamental factors that imply the type of social relationships? In this work, we formalize the problem of social relationship learning into a semi-supervised framework, and propose a Partially-labeled Pairwise Factor Graph Model (PLP-FGM) for learning to infer the type of social ties. We tested the model on three different genres of data sets: Publication, Email and Mobile. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed PLP-FGM model can accurately infer 92.7% of advisoradvisee relationships from the coauthor network (Publication), 88.0% of manager-subordinate relationships from the email network (Email), and 83.1% of the friendships from the mobile network (Mobile). Finally, we develop a distributed learning algorithm to scale up the model to real large networks.