Detecting Strong Ties Using Network Motifs

Abstract

Detecting strong ties among users in social and information networks is a fundamental operation that can improve performance on a multitude of personalization and ranking tasks. There are a variety of ways a tie can be deemed ``strong'', and in this work we use a data-driven (or supervised) approach by assuming that we are provided a sample set of edges labeled as strong ties in the network. Such labeled edges are often readily obtained from the social network as users often participate in multiple overlapping networks via features such as following and messaging. These networks may vary greatly in size, density and the information they carry --- for instance, a heavily-used dense network (such as the network of followers) commonly overlaps with a secondary sparser network composed of strong ties (such as a network of email or phone contacts). This setting leads to a natural strong tie detection task: given a small set of labeled strong tie edges, how well can one detect unlabeled strong ties in the remainder of the network?