Potential friendship discovery in social networks based on hybrid ensemble multiple collaborative filtering models in a 5G network environment

At present, 5G network technology is being applied to various social network modes, and it can provide technical and traffic support for social networks. Potential friendship discovery technology in 5G-enabled social networks is beneficial for users to make potential friends and expand their range of activities and social hierarchy, which is highly sought after in today's social networks and has great economic and application value. However, the sparsity of the dominant user association dataset in 5G-enabled social networks and the limitations of traditional collaborative filtering algorithms are two major challenges for the friend recommendation problem. Therefore, in order to overcome these problems regarding previous models, we propose a Hybrid Ensemble Multiple Collaborative Filtering Model (HEMCF) for discovering potential buddy relationships. The HEMCF model draws on a special autoencoder method that can effectively exploit the association matrix between friends and additional information to extract a hidden representation of users containing global structural information. Then, it uses the random walk-based graph embedding algorithm DeepWalk to extract another hidden representation of users in the buddy network containing local structural information. Finally, in the output module, the HEMCF model stacks and multiplies the two types of hidden representations of users to ensure that the information mentioned above is concentrated in the final output to generate the final prediction value. The magnitude of the prediction value represents the probability of the users being friends, with larger values representing a high probability of the two users being friends, and vice versa. Experimental results show that the proposed method boosts the accuracy of the relationship prediction over baselines on 3 real-world public datasets dramatically.