Ego-net community mining applied to friend suggestion

Abstract

In this paper, we present a study of the community structure of ego-networks---the graphs representing the connections among the neighbors of a node---for several online social networks. Toward this goal, we design a new technique to efficiently build and cluster all the ego-nets of a graph in parallel (note that even just building the ego-nets efficiently is challenging on large networks). Our experimental findings are quite compelling: at a microscopic level it is easy to detect high quality communities. Leveraging on this fact we, then, develop new features for friend suggestion based on co-occurrences of two nodes in different ego-nets' communities. Our new features can be computed efficiently on very large scale graphs by just analyzing the neighborhood of each node. Furthermore, we prove formally on a stylized model, and by experimental analysis that this new similarity measure outperforms the classic local features employed for friend suggestions.