从熟人到永远最好的朋友：社会关系强度的鲁棒和细粒度推断
From acquaintance to best friend forever: robust and fine-grained inference of social tie strengths
摘要：
社交网络通常只提供一种关于社会关系的二元视角：两个人要么有联系，要么没有联系。虽然有时外部信息可以用来推断社会关系的强度，但获取这些信息可能受到限制或不切实际。Sintos和Tsaparas（KDD 2014）首先建议通过利用强三元闭包（STC）属性，仅从网络的拓扑结构中推断社会关系的强度。STC属性指出，如果A与B和C有很强的社会联系，那么B和C也必须相互联系（无论是弱联系还是强联系）。Sintos和Tsaparas利用这一点将社会联系强度的推断公式化为NP-难优化问题，并提出了两种近似算法。我们完善和改进后，这一里程碑式的文件，通过开发一系列的线性松弛这个问题，可以在多项式时间内解决。值得注意的是，这些松弛推断出更细粒度的联系强度水平（超出强和弱），这也允许避免在网络拓扑提供不确定的证据时进行任意的强/弱强度分配。其中一个松弛同时推断存在有限数量的STC违规行为。一个广泛的理论分析导致两个有效的算法方法。最后，我们的实验结果阐明了所提出的方法的优势，并揭示了新的STC属性在实践中的有效性。
英文摘要：
Social networks often provide only a binary perspective on social ties: two individuals are either connected or not. While sometimes external information can be used to infer the strength of social ties, access to such information may be restricted or impractical. Sintos and Tsaparas (KDD 2014) first suggested to infer the strength of social ties from the topology of the network alone, by leveraging the Strong Triadic Closure (STC) property. The STC property states that if person A has strong social ties with persons B and C, B and C must be connected to each other as well (whether with a weak or strong tie). Sintos and Tsaparas exploited this to formulate the inference of the strength of social ties as NP-hard optimization problem, and proposed two approximation algorithms. We refine and improve upon this landmark paper, by developing a sequence of linear relaxations of this problem that can be solved exactly in polynomial time. Usefully, these relaxations infer more fine-grained levels of tie strength (beyond strong and weak), which also allows to avoid making arbitrary strong/weak strength assignments when the network topology provides inconclusive evidence. One of the relaxations simultaneously infers the presence of a limited number of STC violations. An extensive theoretical analysis leads to two efficient algorithmic approaches. Finally, our experimental results elucidate the strengths of the proposed approach, and sheds new light on the validity of the STC property in practice.
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