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Predicting Social Interactions from Different Sources of Location-based Knowledge

Authors:
Michael Steurer
Christoph Trattner
Denis Helic

Keywords: Keywords—Social Interaction Prediction; Location-Based Social Networks; Link Prediction; Virtual Worlds

Abstract:
Recent research has shown that digital online geo-location traces are new and valuable sources to predict social interactions between users, e.g., check-ins via FourSquare or geo-location information in Flickr images. Interestingly, if we look at related work in this area, research studying the extent to which social interactions can be predicted between users by taking more than one location-based knowledge source into account does not exist. To contribute to this field of research, we have collected social interaction data of users in an online social network called My Second Life and three related location-based knowledge sources of these users (monitored locations, shared locations and favored locations), to show the extent to which social interactions between users can be predicted. Using supervised and unsupervised machine learning techniques, we find that on the one hand the same location-based features (e.g. the common regions and common observations) perform well across the three different sources. On the other hand, we find that the shared location information is better suited to predict social interactions between users than monitored or favored location information of the user.

Pages: 8 to 13

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2013

Publication date: November 17, 2013

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2326-9294

ISBN: 978-1-61208-312-4

Location: Lisbon, Portugal

Dates: from November 17, 2013 to November 21, 2013