• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• 제18권4호
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• pp.117-127
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• 2012

Due to the recent expansion of the Web 2.0 -based services, along with the widespread of smartphones, online social network services are being popularized among users. Online social network services are the online community services which enable users to communicate each other, share information and expand human relationships. In the social network services, each relation between users is represented by a graph consisting of nodes and links. As the users of online social network services are increasing rapidly, the SNS are actively utilized in enterprise marketing, analysis of social phenomenon and so on. Social Network Analysis (SNA) is the systematic way to analyze social relationships among the members of the social network using the network theory. In general social network theory consists of nodes and arcs, and it is often depicted in a social network diagram. In a social network diagram, nodes represent individual actors within the network and arcs represent relationships between the nodes. With SNA, we can measure relationships among the people such as degree of intimacy, intensity of connection and classification of the groups. Ever since Social Networking Services (SNS) have drawn increasing attention from millions of users, numerous researches have made to analyze their user relationships and messages. There are typical representative SNA methods: degree centrality, betweenness centrality and closeness centrality. In the degree of centrality analysis, the shortest path between nodes is not considered. However, it is used as a crucial factor in betweenness centrality, closeness centrality and other SNA methods. In previous researches in SNA, the computation time was not too expensive since the size of social network was small. Unfortunately, most SNA methods require significant time to process relevant data, and it makes difficult to apply the ever increasing SNS data in social network studies. For instance, if the number of nodes in online social network is n, the maximum number of link in social network is n(n-1)/2. It means that it is too expensive to analyze the social network, for example, if the number of nodes is 10,000 the number of links is 49,995,000. Therefore, we propose a heuristic-based method for finding the shortest path among users in the SNS user graph. Through the shortest path finding method, we will show how efficient our proposed approach may be by conducting betweenness centrality analysis and closeness centrality analysis, both of which are widely used in social network studies. Moreover, we devised an enhanced method with addition of best-first-search method and preprocessing step for the reduction of computation time and rapid search of the shortest paths in a huge size of online social network. Best-first-search method finds the shortest path heuristically, which generalizes human experiences. As large number of links is shared by only a few nodes in online social networks, most nods have relatively few connections. As a result, a node with multiple connections functions as a hub node. When searching for a particular node, looking for users with numerous links instead of searching all users indiscriminately has a better chance of finding the desired node more quickly. In this paper, we employ the degree of user node vn as heuristic evaluation function in a graph G = (N, E), where N is a set of vertices, and E is a set of links between two different nodes. As the heuristic evaluation function is used, the worst case could happen when the target node is situated in the bottom of skewed tree. In order to remove such a target node, the preprocessing step is conducted. Next, we find the shortest path between two nodes in social network efficiently and then analyze the social network. For the verification of the proposed method, we crawled 160,000 people from online and then constructed social network. Then we compared with previous methods, which are best-first-search and breath-first-search, in time for searching and analyzing. The suggested method takes 240 seconds to search nodes where breath-first-search based method takes 1,781 seconds (7.4 times faster). Moreover, for social network analysis, the suggested method is 6.8 times and 1.8 times faster than betweenness centrality analysis and closeness centrality analysis, respectively. The proposed method in this paper shows the possibility to analyze a large size of social network with the better performance in time. As a result, our method would improve the efficiency of social network analysis, making it particularly useful in studying social trends or phenomena.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• 제20권2호
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• pp.73-92
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• 2014

An Adaptive Clustering-based Collaborative Filtering Technique was proposed to solve the fundamental problems of collaborative filtering, such as cold-start problems, scalability problems and data sparsity problems. Previous collaborative filtering techniques were carried out according to the recommendations based on the predicted preference of the user to a particular item using a similar item subset and a similar user subset composed based on the preference of users to items. For this reason, if the density of the user preference matrix is low, the reliability of the recommendation system will decrease rapidly. Therefore, the difficulty of creating a similar item subset and similar user subset will be increased. In addition, as the scale of service increases, the time needed to create a similar item subset and similar user subset increases geometrically, and the response time of the recommendation system is then increased. To solve these problems, this paper suggests a collaborative filtering technique that adapts a condition actively to the model and adopts the concepts of a context-based filtering technique. This technique consists of four major methodologies. First, items are made, the users are clustered according their feature vectors, and an inter-cluster preference between each item cluster and user cluster is then assumed. According to this method, the run-time for creating a similar item subset or user subset can be economized, the reliability of a recommendation system can be made higher than that using only the user preference information for creating a similar item subset or similar user subset, and the cold start problem can be partially solved. Second, recommendations are made using the prior composed item and user clusters and inter-cluster preference between each item cluster and user cluster. In this phase, a list of items is made for users by examining the item clusters in the order of the size of the inter-cluster preference of the user cluster, in which the user belongs, and selecting and ranking the items according to the predicted or recorded user preference information. Using this method, the creation of a recommendation model phase bears the highest load of the recommendation system, and it minimizes the load of the recommendation system in run-time. Therefore, the scalability problem and large scale recommendation system can be performed with collaborative filtering, which is highly reliable. Third, the missing user preference information is predicted using the item and user clusters. Using this method, the problem caused by the low density of the user preference matrix can be mitigated. Existing studies on this used an item-based prediction or user-based prediction. In this paper, Hao Ji's idea, which uses both an item-based prediction and user-based prediction, was improved. The reliability of the recommendation service can be improved by combining the predictive values of both techniques by applying the condition of the recommendation model. By predicting the user preference based on the item or user clusters, the time required to predict the user preference can be reduced, and missing user preference in run-time can be predicted. Fourth, the item and user feature vector can be made to learn the following input of the user feedback. This phase applied normalized user feedback to the item and user feature vector. This method can mitigate the problems caused by the use of the concepts of context-based filtering, such as the item and user feature vector based on the user profile and item properties. The problems with using the item and user feature vector are due to the limitation of quantifying the qualitative features of the items and users. Therefore, the elements of the user and item feature vectors are made to match one to one, and if user feedback to a particular item is obtained, it will be applied to the feature vector using the opposite one. Verification of this method was accomplished by comparing the performance with existing hybrid filtering techniques. Two methods were used for verification: MAE(Mean Absolute Error) and response time. Using MAE, this technique was confirmed to improve the reliability of the recommendation system. Using the response time, this technique was found to be suitable for a large scaled recommendation system. This paper suggested an Adaptive Clustering-based Collaborative Filtering Technique with high reliability and low time complexity, but it had some limitations. This technique focused on reducing the time complexity. Hence, an improvement in reliability was not expected. The next topic will be to improve this technique by rule-based filtering.