Activeness and Loyalty Analysis in Event-Based Social Networks.

Thanh Trinh,Dingming Wu,Joshua Zhexue Huang,Muhammad Azhar

doi:10.3390/e22010119

Abstract

Event-based social networks (EBSNs) are widely used to create online social groups and organize offline events for users. Activeness and loyalty are crucial characteristics of these online social groups in terms of determining the growth or inactiveness of the social groups in a specific time frame. However, there is less research on these concepts to clarify the existence of groups in event-based social networks. In this paper, we study the problem of group activeness and user loyalty to provide a novel insight into online social networks. First, we analyze the structure of EBSNs and generate features from the crawled datasets. Second, we define the concepts of group activeness and user loyalty based on a series of time windows, and propose a method to measure the group activeness. In this proposed method, we first compute a ratio of a number of events between two consecutive time windows. We then develop an association matrix to assign the activeness label for each group after several consecutive time windows. Similarly, we measure the user loyalty in terms of attended events gathered in time windows and treat loyalty as a contributive feature of the group activeness. Finally, three well-known machine learning techniques are used to verify the activeness label and to generate features for each group. As a consequence, we also find a small group of features that are highly correlated and result in higher accuracy as compared to the whole features.

Highlights

Event-based social networks (EBSNs) [1], such as Meetup or Douban, have been rapidly developed as flexible platforms to create many types of online groups that users can join more conveniently than before
We mainly studied the activeness of groups in a series of consecutive time windows since the groups were created in the network
We define the concept of group activeness in EBSNs based on the numbers of events that are created in different consecutive time windows

Summary

Introduction

Event-based social networks (EBSNs) [1], such as Meetup (www.meetup.com) or Douban (www.douban.com), have been rapidly developed as flexible platforms to create many types of online groups that users can join more conveniently than before. The groups often have specific themes, such as writing, cycling, and sports. In order to maintain the groups’ active status, offline activities are often created monthly or even daily, for example, writing events and cycling events, and members are encouraged to attend. Many users can join different online groups, and they may leave any group after a short period of time. Groups with the same themes and events on similar topics are unavoidable in any kind of social network. The shortage of loyal users makes some groups temporarily inactive or even permanently inactive

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