Recommending Friends Instantly in Location-based Mobile Social Networks

Differently from the general online social network(OSN),locationbased mobile social network(LMSN),which seamlessly integrates mobile computing and social computing technologies,has unique characteristics of temporal,spatial and social correlation.Recommending friends instantly based on current location of users in the real world has become increasingly popular in LMSN.However,the existing friend recommendation methods based on topological structures of a social network or non-topological information such as similar user profiles cannot well address the instant making friends in the real world.In this article,we analyze users' check-in behavior in a real LMSN site named Gowalla.According to this analysis,we present an approach of recommending friends instantly for LMSN users by considering the real-time physical location proximity,offline behavior similarity and friendship network information in the virtual community simultaneously.This approach effectively bridges the gap between the offline behavior of users in the real world and online friendship network information in the virtual community.Finally,we use the real user check-in dataset of Gowalla to verify the effectiveness of our approach.

An Attention-Based Friend Recommendation Model in Social Network

In social networks,user attention affects the user’s decision-making,resulting in a performance alteration of the recommendation systems.Existing systems make recommendations mainly according to users’preferences with a particular focus on items.However,the significance of users’attention and the difference in the influence of different users and items are often ignored.Thus,this paper proposes an attention-based multi-layer friend recommendation model to mitigate information overload in social networks.We first constructed the basic user and item matrix via convolutional neural networks(CNN).Then,we obtained user preferences by using the relationships between users and items,which were later inputted into our model to learn the preferences between friends.The error performance of the proposed method was compared with the traditional solutions based on collaborative filtering.A comprehensive performance evaluation was also conducted using large-scale real-world datasets collected from three popular location-based social networks.The experimental results revealed that our proposal outperforms the traditional methods in terms of recommendation performance.

From Interest to Location： Neighbor-Based Friend Recommendation in Social Media

Recent years have witnessed the tremendous development of social media, which attracts a vast number of Internet users. The tweets these users posted provide an effective way of understanding user behaviors. A large amount of previous work benefits from mining user interest to make friend recommendation. However, the potentially strong but inconspicuous relation between location and interest interaction among social media users is overlooked in these studies. Different from the previous researches, we propose a new concept named neighbor-based friend recommendation （NBFR） to improve the friend recommendation results. By recommending surrounding users who have similar interest to each other, social media users are provided a unique opportunity to interact with surrounding people they may want to know. Based on this concept, we first mine users＇ interest from short tweets, and then propose to model the user interest with multiple topics under the hypercube structure for friend recommendation. At the same time, we also offer a topic matching shortcut algorithm for more extensive recommendation. The evaluations using the data gathered from the real users demonstrate the advantage of NBFR compared with the traditional recommendation approaches.

Improving Friend Recommendation for Online Learning with Fine-Grained Evolving Interest

Friend recommendation plays a key role in promoting user experience in online social networks(OSNs).However,existing studies usually neglect users’fine-grained interest as well as the evolving feature of interest,which may cause unsuitable recommendation.In particular,some OSNs,such as the online learning community,even have little work on friend recommendation.To this end,we strive to improve friend recommendation with fine-grained evolving interest in this paper.We take the online learning community as an application scenario,which is a special type of OSNs for people to learn courses online.Learning partners can help improve learners’learning effect and improve the attractiveness of platforms.We propose a learning partner recommendation framework based on the evolution of fine-grained learning interest(LPRF-E for short).We extract a sequence of learning interest tags that changes over time.Then,we explore the time feature to predict evolving learning interest.Next,we recommend learning partners by fine-grained interest similarity.We also refine the learning partner recommendation framework with users’social influence(denoted as LPRF-F for differentiation).Extensive experiments on two real datasets crawled from Chinese University MOOC and Douban Book validate that the proposed LPRF-E and LPRF-F models achieve a high accuracy(i.e.,approximate 50%improvements on the precision and the recall)and can recommend learning partners with high quality(e.g.,more experienced and helpful).