A User-Centric Feature Identification and Modeling Approach to Infer Social Ties in OSNs

This paper aims to identify user-centric features to calculate the strength of social ties between Online Social Network (OSN) users, and models the same using Latent Space Model (LSM). The modeling approach processes a socio-centric user-set as the users are directly (friend) or indirectly (friend-of-friend) related to a seed (target) user, which makes it easier to identify social ties between users as compared to random sampling from a set of diverse OSN users. For a given user, interaction data up to two levels is modeled and analyzed to generate a user-centric social network. Eleven different features related to Facebook have been identified to calculate the strength of social ties between users. LSM is used to visualize relationships in user-centric historical data and to estimate the probability of social ties between OSN users. The users are plotted using LSM in a three-dimensional (3D) social space around a seed user, and a link probability function is devised to calculate the probability of link between any two users with respect to the persona of the seed user. A sphere of influence around each user demarcating its active influence area is also identified and discussed in this paper.