The Research of “Products Rapidly Attracting Users” Based on the Fully Integrated Link Prediction Algorithm

Abstract

One of the main problems encountered by social networks is the cold start problem. The term “cold start problem” refers to the difficulty in predicting new users’ friendships due to the limited number of links those users have with existing nodes. To fill the gap, this paper proposes a Fully Integrated Link Prediction Algorithm (FILPA) that describes the social distance of nodes by using “betweenness centrality,” and develops a Social Distance Index (SDI) based on micro- and macro-network structure according to social distance. With the aim of constructing adaptive SDIs that are suitable for the characteristics of a network, a naive Bayes (NB) method is firstly adopted to select appropriate SDIs according to the density and social distance characteristics of common neighbors in the local network. To avoid the risk of algorithm accuracy reduction caused by blind combination of SDIs, the AdaBoost meta-learning strategy is applied to develop a Fully Integrated Social Distance Index (FISDI) composed of the best SDIs screened by NB. The possible friendships among nodes will then be comprehensively presented using high performance FISDI. Finally, in order to realize the “products rapidly attracting users” in new user marketing, FILPA is used to predict the possible friendship between new users in an online brand community and others in different product circles.

Keywords

• friend recommendation
• link prediction
• FILPA
• cold start
• rapidly gaining followers