Social-Network Analysis Using Topic Models

In this paper, we discuss how we can extend probabilistic topic models to analyze the relationship graph of popular social-network data, so that we can "group" or "label" the edges and nodes in the graph based on their topic similarity. In particular, we first apply the well-known Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) model and its existing variants to the graph-labeling task and argue that the existing models do not handle popular nodes (nodes with many incoming edges) in the graph very well. We then propose possible extensions to this model to deal with popular nodes. Our experiments show that the proposed extensions are very effective in labeling popular nodes, showing significant improvements over the existing methods. Our proposed methods can be used for providing, for instance, more relevant friend recommendations within a social network.