A community-based pseudolikelihood approach for relationship labeling in social networks

Abstract

A social network consists of people (or other social entities) connected by a set of social relationships. Awareness of the relationship types is very helpful for us to understand the structure and the characteristics of the social network. Traditional classifiers are not accurate enough for relationship labeling since they assume that all the labels are independent and identically distributed. A relational probabilistic model, relational Markov networks (RMNs), is introduced to labeling relationships, but the inefficient parameter estimation makes it difficult to deploy in large-scale social networks. In this paper, we propose a community-based pseudolikelihood (CBPL) approach for relationship labeling. The community structure of a social network is used to assist in constructing the conditional random field, and this makes our approach reasonable and accurate. In addition, the computational simplicity of pseudolikelihood effectively resolves the time complexity problem which RMNs are suffering. We apply our approach on two real-world social networks, one is a terrorist relation network and the other is a phone call network we collected from encrypted call detail records. In our experiments, for avoiding losing links while splitting a closely connected social network into separate training and test subsets, we split the datasets according to the links rather than the individuals. The experimental results show that our approach performs well in terms of accuracy and efficiency. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.