Factor Graph Model Based User Profile Matching Across Social Networks

• Main Authors: Lidong Wang, Keyong Hu, Yun Zhang, Shihua Cao
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 2019-01-01
• Series: IEEE Access
• Subjects: Cross-platform; user profile matching; factor graph model; friend relationship; PIFGM method
• Online Access: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8873650/

In modern society, it is common for people to be active in many different online social networks at once. As new social network services arise every year, it remains a great challenge to integrate social data. Discovering multiple profiles of a single person across different social networks is a precondition for integration, but it is still challenging due to the inconsistency and disruption of the accessible information among social media networks (SMNs). Many studies have made efforts on user's profiles, users' contents, and network structure to address this issue, but the issue of how to consider all these information in a unified model and tackle them simultaneously still remains challenging. Considering that identical users tend to have partial similar friend relationship structures in different SMNs, especially friendship SMNs, we deepen the analysis of “friend” relationships (mutual following connections) in different SMNs, and propose PIFGM (Pairwise Identical Factor Graph Model), a novel factor graph model-based model, to address this problem by considering both user attributes and friend relationships across networks. We also present a distributed learning algorithm to handle large-scale social networks. We evaluate the proposed model on two different data collections: SNS and SR. Our experimental results validate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed model. The proposed PIFGM significantly outperforms several alternative methods by up to approximately 10%~20% in terms of F1 and precision on SNS and SR respectively.