Relationship strength estimation based on Wechat Friends Circle

Abstract

Wechat has become a popular way in China for users to connect and share information with their friends. In particular, Wechat Friends Circle is a popular platform for users to express themselves. It is useful in many real applications, such as personalized recommendations, to calculate the relationship strength between Friends Circle users. However, most existed researches do not apply to the Wechat Friends Circle due to the uniqueness that users can only see a common friend's comments or point praise, which is quite different from the general social network. To meet this need, in this paper we propose a general framework to measure the relationship strengths between different users in Wechat Friends Circle, considering not only the similarity of users’ profile information, but also the interaction between users. We conduct a set of experiments on Friends Circle dataset, from which we learn that the proposed framework is efficient and promising on improving the performances of relationship strength calculation.