Exploiting Direct and Indirect Information for Friend Suggestion in ZingMe

Friend suggestion is a fundamental problem in social networks with the goal of assisting users in creating more relationships, and thereby enhances interest of users to the social networks. This problem is often considered to be the link prediction problem in the network. ZingMe is one of the largest social networks in Vietnam. In this paper, we analyze the current approach for the friend suggestion problem in ZingMe, showing its limitations and disadvantages. We propose a new efficient approach for friend suggestion that uses information from the network structure, attributes and interactions of users to create resources for the evaluation of friend connection amongst users. Friend connection is evaluated exploiting both direct communication between the users and information from other ones in the network. The proposed approach has been implemented in a new system version of ZingMe. We conducted experiments, exploiting a dataset derived from the users’ real use of ZingMe, to compare the newly proposed approach to the current approach and some well-known ones for the accuracy of friend suggestion. The experimental results show that the newly proposed approach outperforms the current one, i.e., by an increase of 7% to 98% on average in the friend suggestion accuracy. The proposed approach also outperforms other ones for users who have a small number of friends with improvements from 20% to 85% on average. In this paper, we also discuss a number of open issues and possible improvements for the proposed approach.