Online social network user performance prediction by graph neural networks

Abstract

Online social networks provide rich information that characterizes the user’s personality, his interests, hobbies, and reflects his current state. Users of social networks publish photos, posts, videos, audio, etc. every day. Online social networks (OSN) open up a wide range of research opportunities for scientists. Much research conducted in recent years using graph neural networks (GNN) has shown their advantages over conventional deep learning. In particular, the use of graph neural networks for online social network analysis seems to be the most suitable. In this article we studied the use of graph convolutional neural networks with different convolution layers (GCNConv, SAGEConv, GraphConv, GATConv, TransformerConv, GINConv) for predicting the user’s professional success in VKontakte online social network, based on data obtained from his profiles. We have used various parameters obtained from users’ personal pages in VKontakte social network (the number of friends, subscribers, interesting pages, etc.) as their features for determining the professional success, as well as networks (graphs) reflecting connections between users (followers/ friends). In this work we performed graph classification by using graph convolutional neural networks (with different types of convolution layers). The best accuracy of the graph convolutional neural network (0.88) was achieved by using the graph isomorphism network (GIN) layer. The results, obtained in this work, will serve for further studies of social success, based on metrics of personal profiles of OSN users and social graphs using neural network methods.