Distance and Friendship: A Distance-Based Model for Link Prediction in Social Networks

With the emerging of location-based social networks, study on the relationship between human mobility and social relationships becomes quantitatively achievable. Understanding it correctly could result in appealing applications, such as targeted advertising and friends recommendation. In this paper, we focus on mining users’ relationship based on their mobility information. More specifically, we propose to use distance between two users to predict whether they are friends. We first demonstrate that distance is a useful metric to separate friends and strangers. By considering location popularity together with distance, the difference between friends and strangers gets even larger. Next, we show that distance can be used to perform an effective link prediction. In addition, we discover that certain periods of the day are more social than others. In the end, we use a machine learning classifier to further improve the prediction performance. Extensive experiments on a Twitter dataset collected by ourselves show that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art solution by 30%.