An algorithm for identifying the best current friend in a social network

A research field in the area of social networks (SNs) is the identification of some types of users and groups. To facilitate this process, a SN is usually represented by a graph. The centrality measures, which identify the most important vertices in a graph according to some criterion, are usual too...

Full description

Autores:
Moreno, Francisco Javier
Hernández, Santiago
Tipo de recurso:
Article of journal
Fecha de publicación:
2015
Institución:
Universidad Nacional de Colombia
Repositorio:
Universidad Nacional de Colombia
Idioma:
spa
OAI Identifier:
oai:repositorio.unal.edu.co:unal/67679
Acceso en línea:
https://repositorio.unal.edu.co/handle/unal/67679
http://bdigital.unal.edu.co/68708/
Palabra clave:
62 Ingeniería y operaciones afines / Engineering
Social networks
friends
centrality measures
PageRank
graphs.
Redes sociales
amigos
medidas de centralidad
PageRank
grafos
Rights
openAccess
License
Atribución-NoComercial 4.0 Internacional
Description
Summary:A research field in the area of social networks (SNs) is the identification of some types of users and groups. To facilitate this process, a SN is usually represented by a graph. The centrality measures, which identify the most important vertices in a graph according to some criterion, are usual tools to analyze a graph. One of these measures is the PageRank (a measure originally designed to classify web pages). Informally, in the context of a SN, the PageRank of a user i represents the probability that another user of the SN is seeing the page of i after a considerable time of navigation in the SN. In this paper, we define a new type of user in a SN: the best current friend. The idea is to identify, among the friends of a user i, who is the friend k that would generate the highest decrease in the PageRank of i if k stops being his/her friend. This may be useful to identify the users/customers whose friendship/relationship should be a priority to keep. We provide formal definitions, algorithms and some experiments for this subject. Our experiments showed that the best current friend of a user is not necessarily the one who has the highest PageRank in the SN nor the one who has more friends.