Operators of online social networks are increasingly sharing potentially sensitive information about users and their relationships with advertisers, application developers, and data-mining researchers. Privacy is typically protected by anonymization, i.e., removing names, addresses, etc. We present a framework for analyzing privacy and anonymity in social networks and develop a new re-identification algorithm targeting anonymized socialnetwork graphs. To demonstrate its effectiveness on realworld networks, we show that a third of the users who can be verified to have accounts on both Twitter, a popular microblogging service, and Flickr, an online photo-sharing site, can be re-identified in the anonymous Twitter graph with only a 12 % error rate. Our de-anonymization algorithm is based purely on the network topology, does not require creation of a large number of dummy “sybil ” nodes, is robust to noise and all existing defenses, and works even when the overlap between the target network and the adversary’s auxiliary information is small. 1.

Many databases contain uncertain and imprecise references to real-world entities. The absence of identifiers for the underlying entities often results in a database which contains multiple references to the same entity. This can lead not only to data redundancy, but also inaccuracies in query processing and knowledge extraction. These problems can be alleviated through the use of entity resolution. Entity resolution involves discovering the underlying entities and mapping each database reference to these entities. Traditionally, entities are resolved using pairwise similarity over the attributes of references. However, there is often additional relational information in the data. Specifically, references to different entities may cooccur. In these cases, collective entity resolution, in which entities for cooccurring references are determined jointly rather than independently, can improve entity resolution accuracy. We propose a novel relational clustering algorithm that uses both attribute and relational information for determining the underlying domain entities, and we give an efficient implementation. We investigate the impact that different relational similarity measures have on entity resolution quality. We evaluate our collective entity resolution algorithm on multiple real-world databases. We show that it improves entity resolution performance over both attribute-based baselines and over algorithms that consider relational information but do not resolve entities collectively. In addition, we perform detailed experiments on synthetically generated data to identify data characteristics that favor collective relational resolution over purely attribute-based algorithms.

Weblogs link together in a complex structure through which new ideas and discourse can flow. Such a structure is ideal for the study of the propagation of information. In this paper we describe general categories of information epidemics and create a tool to infer and visualize the paths specific infections take through the network. This inference is based in part on a novel utilization of data describing historical, repeating patterns of infection. We conclude with a description of a new ranking algorithm, iRank, for blogs. In contrast to traditional ranking strategies, iRank acts on the implicit link structure to find those blogs that initiate these epidemics.

We present a detailed study of network evolution by analyzing four large online social networks with full temporal information about node and edge arrivals. For the first time at such a large scale, we study individual node arrival and edge creation processes that collectively lead to macroscopic properties of networks. Using a methodology based on the maximum-likelihood principle, we investigate a wide variety of network formation strategies, and show that edge locality plays a critical role in evolution of networks. Our findings supplement earlier network models based on the inherently non-local preferential attachment. Based on our observations, we develop a complete model of network evolution, where nodes arrive at a prespecified rate and select their lifetimes. Each node then independently initiates edges according to a “gap” process, selecting a destination for each edge according to a simple triangle-closing model free of any parameters. We show analytically that the combination of the gap distribution with the node lifetime leads to a power law out-degree distribution that accurately reflects the true network in all four cases. Finally, we give model parameter settings that allow automatic evolution and generation of realistic synthetic networks of arbitrary scale.

Social media treats all users the same: trusted friend or total stranger, with little or nothing in between. In reality, relationships fall everywhere along this spectrum, a topic social science has investigated for decades under the theme of tie strength. Our work bridges this gap between theory and practice. In this paper, we present a predictive model that maps social media data to tie strength. The model builds on a dataset of over 2,000 social media ties and performs quite well, distinguishing between strong and weak ties with over 85 % accuracy. We complement these quantitative findings with interviews that unpack the relationships we could not predict. The paper concludes by illustrating how modeling tie strength can improve social media design elements, including privacy controls, message routing, friend introductions and information prioritization. Author Keywords Social media, social networks, relationship modeling, ties,

Abstract. Network-based marketing refers to a collection of marketing techniques that take advantage of links between consumers to increase sales. We concentrate on the consumer networks formed using direct interactions (e.g., communications) between consumers. We survey the diverse literature on such marketing with an emphasis on the statistical methods used and the data to which these methods have been applied. We also provide a discussion of challenges and opportunities for this burgeoning research topic. Our survey highlights a gap in the literature. Because of inadequate data, prior studies have not been able to provide direct, statistical support for the hypothesis that network linkage can directly affect product/service adoption. Using a new data set that represents the adoption of a new telecommunications service, we show very strong support for the hypothesis. Specifically, we show three main results: (1) “Network neighbors”—those consumers linked to a prior customer—adopt the service at a rate 3–5 times greater than baseline groups selected by the best practices of the firm’s marketing team. In addition, analyzing the network allows the firm to acquire new customers who otherwise would have fallen through the cracks, because they would not have been identified based on traditional attributes. (2) Statistical models, built with a very large amount of geographic, demographic and prior purchase data, are significantly and substantially improved by including network information. (3) More detailed network information allows the ranking of the network neighbors so as to permit the selection of small sets of individuals with very high probabilities of adoption. Key words and phrases: Viral marketing, word of mouth, targeted marketing, network analysis, classification, statistical relational learning. 1.

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Given Q nodes in a social network (say, authorship network), how can we find the node/author that is the centerpiece, and has direct or indirect connections to all, or most of them? For example, this node could be the common advisor, or someone who started the research area that the Q nodes belong to. Isomorphic scenarios appear in law enforcement (find the master-mind criminal, connected to all current suspects), gene regulatory networks (find the protein that participates in pathways with all or most of the given Q proteins), viral marketing and many more. Connection subgraphs is an important first step, handling the case of Q=2 query nodes. Then, the connection subgraph algorithm finds the b intermediate nodes, that provide a good connection between the two original query nodes. Here we generalize the challenge in multiple dimensions: First, we allow more than two query nodes. Second, we allow a whole family of queries, ranging from ’OR ’ to ’AND’, with ’softAND ’ in-between. Finally, we design and compare a fast approximation, and study the quality/speed trade-off. We also present experiments on the DBLP dataset. The experiments confirm that our proposed method naturally deals with multi-source queries and that the resulting subgraphs agree with our intuition. Wall-clock timing results on the DBLP dataset show that our proposed approximation achieve good accuracy for about 6: 1 speedup. This material is based upon work supported by the

Many datasets of interest today are best described as a linked collection of interrelated objects. These may represent homogeneous networks, in which there is a single-object type and link type, or richer, heterogeneous networks, in which there may be multiple object and link types (and possibly other semantic information). Examples of homogeneous networks include single mode social networks, such as people connected by friendship links, or the WWW, a collection of linked web pages. Examples of heterogeneous networks include those in medical domains describing patients, diseases, treatments and contacts, or in bibliographic domains describing publications, authors, and venues. Link mining refers to data mining techniques that explicitly consider these links when building predictive or descriptive models of the linked data. Commonly addressed link mining tasks include object ranking, group detection, collective classification, link prediction and subgraph discovery. While network analysis has been studied in depth in particular areas such as social network analysis, hypertext mining, and web analysis, only recently has there been a cross-fertilization of ideas among these different communities. This is an exciting, rapidly expanding area. In this article, we review some of the common emerging themes. 1.

Advances in technology have made it possible to collect data about individuals and the connections between them, such as email correspondence and friendships. Agencies and researchers who have collected such social network data often have a compelling interest in allowing others to analyze the data. However, in many cases the data describes relationships that are private (e.g., email correspondence) and sharing the data in full can result in unacceptable disclosures. In this paper, we present a framework for assessing the privacy risk of sharing anonymized network data. This includes a model of adversary knowledge, for which we consider several variants and make connections to known graph theoretical results. On several real-world social networks, we show that simple anonymization techniques are inadequate, resulting in substantial breaches of privacy for even modestly informed adversaries. We propose a novel anonymization technique based on perturbing the network and demonstrate empirically that it leads to substantial reduction of the privacy threat. We also analyze the effect that anonymizing the network has on the utility of the data for social network analysis.