Efficient sampling of information in social networks

As online social networking emerges, there has been increased interest to utilize the underlying social structure as well as the available social information to improve search. In this paper, we focus on improving the performance of information collection from the neighborhood of a user in a dynamic social network. To this end, we introduce sampling based algorithms to quickly approximate quantities of interest from the vicinity of a user's social graph. We then introduce and analyze variants of this basic scheme exploring correlations across our samples. Models of centralized and distributed social networks are considered. We show that our algorithms can be utilized to rank items in the neighborhood of a user, assuming that information for each user in the network is available. Using real and synthetic data sets, we validate the results of our analysis and demonstrate the efficiency of our algorithms in approximating quantities of interest. The methods we describe are general an...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: CIKM
• Authors: Gautam Das, Nick Koudas, Manos Papagelis, Sushruth Puttaswamy
• Keywords: CIKM 2008, Information Management, Social, Social Graph, Social Networks