Exploiting User Friendship Networks for User Identification across Social Networks

Abstract

Identifying offline entities corresponding to multiple virtual accounts of users across social networks is crucial for the development of related fields, such as user recommendation system, network security, and user behavior pattern analysis. The data generated by users on multiple social networks has similarities. Thus, the concept of symmetry can be used to analyze user-generated information for user identification. In this paper, we propose a friendship networks-based user identification across social networks algorithm (FNUI), which performs the similarity of multi-hop neighbor nodes of a user to characterize the information redundancy in the friend networks fully. Subsequently, a gradient descent algorithm is used to optimize the contribution of the user’s multi-hop nodes in the user identification process. Ultimately, user identification is achieved in conjunction with the Gale–Shapley matching algorithm. Experimental results show that compared with baselines, such as friend relationship-based user identification (FRUI) and friendship learning-based user identification (FBI): (1) The contribution of single-hop neighbor nodes in the user identification process is higher than other multi-hop neighbor nodes; (2) The redundancy of information contained in multi-hop neighbor nodes has a more significant impact on user identification; (3) The precision rate, recall rate, comprehensive evaluation index (F1), and area under curve (AUC) of user identification have been improved.