Abstract
Online social networks provide a forum where people make new connections, learn more about the world, get exposed to different points of view, and access information that were previously inaccessible. It is natural to assume that content-delivery algorithms in social networks should not only aim to maximize user engagement but also to offer opportunities for increasing connectivity and enabling social networks to achieve their full potential. Our motivation and aim is to develop methods that foster the creation of new connections, and subsequently, improve the flow of information in the network. To achieve our goal, we propose to leverage the strong triadic closure principle, and consider violations to this principle as opportunities for creating more social links. We formalize this idea as an algorithmic problem related to the densest k-subgraph problem. For this new problem, we establish hardness results and propose approximation algorithms. We identify two special cases of the problem that admit a constant-factor approximation. Finally, we experimentally evaluate our proposed algorithm on real-world social networks, and we additionally evaluate some simpler but more scalable algorithms.
Highlights
In the past decade we have witnessed social networks becoming an integral part of society
Proof Given a graph G = (V, E) input to the dks problem, we create an instance of the MaximizeSTCBridges-d problem as follows: we consider the complement of G, which we denote by G = (V, E), and we define by {u, v} ∈ E if and only if {u, v} ∈/ E
In order to prove the hardness of the MaximizeSTCBridges problem, we reduced the densest k-subgraph problem to it
Summary
In the past decade we have witnessed social networks becoming an integral part of society. In one of the first works, Sintos and Tsaparas (2014) search for an assignment of tie strengths, which maximizes the number of strong edges, while ensuring that the stc property is respected over the whole network Subsequent works refined this methodology by studying less rigid versions of the stc property (Adriaens et al 2020), as well as considering the interplay with community structure (Rozenshtein et al 2017). Our problem formulation is centered around the assumption that according to the stc principle, two people with a common close friend have a higher opportunity to meet and form a new connection. We refer to these connections as stc bridges.
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