An estimation model for social relationship strength based on users' profiles, co-occurrence and interaction activities

As the growing popularity of the Internet, the online social network has become an indispensable part and played a more and more important role in our daily life. People in the online social networks would link with their friends through chatting, e-mail, posting, commenting directly, which are built on the mature relationships in reality. However, this link-ship provides only a coarse representation of relationship rather than revealing the relationship strengths. Accurate measurement of social relationship could be applied to many applications, such as project or paper review. In this paper, we propose a probabilistic graphical model to measure the relationship strengths between different users in the social network by taking consideration of the similarities among users profiles, co-occurrence of user names and interaction activities in different activity fields. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.