Who Spread to Whom? Inferring Online Social Networks with User Features

Network inference has been extensively studied to better understand the information diffusion in online social networks. In this field, state-of-art widely adopted a priori knowledge related to users' infection time stamps. Researchers also assume that the smaller the time difference between two nodes, the higher the likelihood of an edge between the pair of users. However, according to our technical analyses and empirical studies, existing methods have two critical problems 1) alternative spreading paths 2) users' delivery delay, which leads to the inaccuracy of previous methods. In this paper, we developed an innovative method to address the inference inaccuracy caused by the exposed two problems. This method determined the existence of an edge between a pair of users according to part of the users' features. The experiment results suggested that our method achieved around 70% accuracy in inferring network structures while existing methods failed in the same tasks.