Predicting Friends and Foes in Signed Networks Using Inductive Inference and Social Balance Theory

Abstract

Besides the notion of friendship, trust or support in social networking sites (SNSs), quite often social interactions also reflect users' antagonistic attitude towards each other. Thus, the hidden knowledge contained in social network data can be considered as an important resource to discover the formation of such positive and negative links. In this work, an inductive learning framework is presented to suggest 'friends' and 'foes' links to individuals which envisage the social balance among users in the corresponding friends and foes networks (FFN). First we learn a model by applying C4.5, the most widely adopted decision tree based classification algorithm, to exploit the feature patterns presented in the users' FFN and utilizing it to further predict friend/foe relationship of unknown links. Secondly, a quantitative measure of social balance, balance index, is used to support our decision on the recommendation of new friends and foes links (FFL) to avoid possible imbalance in the extended FFN with newly suggested links. The proposed scheme ensures that the recommendation of new FFLs either maintains or enhances the balancing factor of the existing FFN of an individual. Experimental results show the effectiveness of our proposed schemes.