Friend recommendation for cross marketing in online brand community based on intelligent attention allocation link prediction algorithm

Abstract

Circle structure of online brand communities allows companies to conduct cross-marketing activities by the influence of friends in different circles and build strong and lasting relationships with customers. However, existing works on the friend recommendation in social network do not consider establishing friendships between users in different circles, which has the problems of network sparsity, neither do they study the adaptive generation of appropriate link prediction algorithms for different circle features. In order to fill the gaps in previous works, the intelligent attention allocation link prediction algorithm is proposed to adaptively build attention allocation index (AAI) according to the sparseness of the network and predict the possible friendships between users in different circles. The AAI reflects the amount of attention allocated to the user pair by their common friend in the triadic closure structure, which is decided by the friend count of the common friend. Specifically, for the purpose of overcoming the problem of network sparsity, the AAIs of both the direct common friends and indirect ones are developed. Next, the decision tree (DT) method is constructed to adaptively select the suitable AAIs for the circle structure based on the density of common friends and the dispersion level of common friends’ attention. In addition, for the sake of further improving the accuracy of the selected AAI, its complementary AAIs are identified with support vector machine model according to their similarity in value, direction, and ranking. Finally, the mutually complementary indices are combined into a composite one to comprehensively portray the attention distribution of common friends of users in different circles and predict their possible friendships for cross-marketing activities. Experimental results on Twitter and Google+ show that the model has highly reliable prediction performance.