User Profile Similarity Research Articles

Are You a Cyborg, Bot or Human?—A Survey on Detecting Fake News Spreaders

One of the major components of Societal Digitalization is Online social networks (OSNs). OSNs can expose people to different popular trends in various aspects of life and alter people’s beliefs, behaviors, and decisions and communication. Social bots and malicious users are the significant sources for spreading misinformation on social media and can pose serious cyber threats in society. The degree of similarity of user profiles of a cyber bot and a malicious user spreading fake news is so great that it is very difficult to differentiate both based on their attributes. Over the years, researchers have attempted to find a way to mitigate this problem. However, the detection of fake news spreaders across OSNs remains a challenge. In this paper, we have provided a comprehensive survey of the state of art methods for detecting malicious users and bots based on different features proposed in our novel taxonomy. We have also aimed to avert the crucial problem of fake news detection by discussing several key challenges and potential future research areas to help researchers who are new to this field.

Entropy-Based Quantification of Privacy Attained Through User Profile Similarity

Location-based services refer to services that use location as primary input. But accessing user's location by an adversary invites issues of privacy breach. Instead of specific location coordinates, its surrounding area known as cloaking region is revealed in order to get the service. K anonymity technique of location privacy ensures that at least K-1 users should be included within a specific cloaked region. Researches have established that on combining K anonymity with the idea of including similar users together in a cloaked region provides stringent privacy (especially from background and heterogeneity attacks). This work quantifies the amount of privacy gain attained through, opting-for users with similar profiles instead of random users. The quantification is done by using KL divergence. Values of KL divergence of user profiles have been calculated for different cloaking regions containing similar and random users. Low KL divergence values depict privacy gains up to 33% for users with similar profiles.

Resource recommendation via user tagging behavior analysis

Tag-based resource recommendation is an interesting and important research topic and has been applied to a wide range of applications. The user’s tagging behavior usually reflects his/her interests in social tagging systems, however most existing work can not fully consider the features of user’s tagging behavior, such as tag frequency, time and ordinal position in tag assignments. In this paper, we employ the combination of cluster analysis and data fitting for extracting the correlations between user interests and the three features, and then present a novel user interest model based on the features to compute the user interest degree. In addition, we propose a collaborative filtering based approach, in which top-k similar users are filtered by resource-interest-based profiles; resource similarities are obtained by tag-frequency-based profiles; the candidate resources are then ranked according to the user interest model, resource profile similarity and user profile similarity. The experiment results conducted on two real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms the traditional collaborative filtering baselines.

Secure Cloaking Area Based on User Profile Similarity

Secure Cloaking Area Based on User Profile Similarity

“With a little help from new friends”: Boosting information cascades in social networks based on link injection

We investigate information cascades in the context of viral marketing applications. Recent research has identified that communities in social networks may hinder cascades. To overcome this problem, we propose a novel method for injecting social links in a social network, aiming at boosting the spread of information cascades. Unlike the proposed approach, existing link prediction methods do not consider the optimization of information cascades as an explicit objective. In our proposed method, the injected links are being predicted in a collaborative-filtering fashion, based on factorizing the adjacency matrix that represents the structure of the social network. Our method controls the number of injected links to avoid an “aggressive” injection scheme that may compromise the experience of users. We evaluate the performance of the proposed method by examining real data sets from social networks and several additional factors. Our results indicate that the proposed scheme can boost information cascades in social networks and can operate as a “people recommendations” strategy complementary to currently applied methods that are based on the number of common neighbors (e.g., “friend of friend”) or on the similarity of user profiles.

Discovering social circles in ego networks

People's personal social networks are big and cluttered, and currently there is no good way to automatically organize them. Social networking sites allow users to manually categorize their friends into social circles (e.g., “circles” on Google+, and “lists” on Facebook and Twitter). However, circles are laborious to construct and must be manually updated whenever a user's network grows. In this article, we study the novel task of automatically identifying users' social circles. We pose this task as a multimembership node clustering problem on a user's ego network, a network of connections between her friends. We develop a model for detecting circles that combines network structure as well as user profile information. For each circle, we learn its members and the circle-specific user profile similarity metric. Modeling node membership to multiple circles allows us to detect overlapping as well as hierarchically nested circles. Experiments show that our model accurately identifies circles on a diverse set of data from Facebook, Google+, and Twitter, for all of which we obtain hand-labeled ground truth.

Enabling topic-level trust for collaborative information sharing

As a consequence of the exponential growth of Internet and its services, including social applications fostering collaboration on the Web, information sharing had become pervasive. This caused a crescent need of more powerful tools to help users with the task of selecting interesting resources. Recommender systems have emerged as a solution to evaluate the quality of massively user-generated contents in open environments and provide recommendations based not only on the user interests but also on the opinions of people with similar tastes. In addition to interest similarity, however, trustworthiness is a factor that recommenders have to consider in the selection of reliable peers for collaboration. Most approaches in this regard estimates trust base on global user profile similarity or history of exchanged opinions. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for agent-based recommendation in which trust is independently learned and evolved for each pair of interest topics two users have in common. Experimental results show that agents learning who to trust about certain topics reach better levels of precision than considering interest similarity exclusively.

Sequence-based trust in collaborative filtering for document recommendation

Collaborative filtering (CF) recommender systems have emerged in various applications to support item recommendation, which solve the information-overload problem by suggesting items of interest to users. Recently, trust-based recommender systems have incorporated the trustworthiness of users into CF techniques to improve the quality of recommendation. They propose trust computation models to derive the trust values based on users' past ratings on items. A user is more trustworthy if s/he has contributed more accurate predictions than other users. Nevertheless, conventional trust-based CF methods do not address the issue of deriving the trust values based on users' various information needs on items over time. In knowledge-intensive environments, users usually have various information needs in accessing required documents over time, which forms a sequence of documents ordered according to their access time. We propose a sequence-based trust model to derive the trust values based on users' sequences of ratings on documents. The model considers two factors – time factor and document similarity – in computing the trustworthiness of users. The proposed model enhanced with the similarity of user profiles is incorporated into a standard collaborative filtering method to discover trustworthy neighbors for making predictions. The experiment result shows that the proposed model can improve the prediction accuracy of CF method in comparison with other trust-based recommender systems.

PERCIRS: a system to combine personalized and collaborative information retrieval

PurposeThis paper aims to discuss and test the claim that utilization of the personalization techniques can be valuable to improve the efficiency of collaborative information retrieval (CIR) systems.Design/methodology/approachA new personalized CIR system, called PERCIRS, is presented based on the user profile similarity calculation (UPSC) formulas. To this aim, the paper proposes several UPSC formulas as well as two techniques to evaluate them. As the proposed CIR system is personalized, it could not be evaluated by Cranfield, like evaluation techniques (e.g. TREC). Hence, this paper proposes a new user‐centric mechanism, which enables PERCIRS to be evaluated. This mechanism is generic and can be used to evaluate any other personalized IR system.FindingsThe results show that among the proposed UPSC formulas in this paper, the (query‐document)‐graph based formula is the most effective. After integrating this formula into PERCIRS and comparing it with nine other IR systems, it is concluded that the results of the system are better than the other IR systems. In addition, the paper shows that the complexity of the system is less that the complexity of the other CIR systems.Research limitations/implicationsThis system asks the users to explicitly rank the returned documents, while explicit ranking is still not widespread enough. However it believes that the users should actively participate in the IR process in order to aptly satisfy their needs to information.Originality/valueThe value of this paper lies in combining collaborative and personalized IR, as well as introducing a mechanism which enables the personalized IR system to be evaluated. The proposed evaluation mechanism is very valuable for developers of personalized IR systems. The paper also introduces some significant user profile similarity calculation formulas, and two techniques to evaluate them. These formulas can also be used to find the user's community in the social networks.