LINKZONE SOCIAL NETWORKING RECOMMENDER SYSTEM

Abstract

Existing social networking services recommend friends to users based on their social graphs, which may not be the most appropriate to reflect a user’s preferences on friend selection in real life. In this paper, we present Linkzone, a novel semantic-based friend recommendation system for social networks, which recommends friends to users based on their life styles instead of social graphs. By taking advantage of sensor-rich smartphones, Linkzone discovers life styles of users from user-centric sensor data, measures the similarity of life styles between users, and recommends friends to users if their life styles have high similarity. Inspired by text mining, we model a user’s daily life as life documents, from which his/her life styles are extracted by using the Latent Dirichlet Allocation algorithm. We further propose a similarity metric to measure the similarity of life styles between users, and calculate users’ impact in terms of life styles with a friend-matching graph. Upon receiving a request, Linkzone returns a list of people with highest recommendation scores to the query user. Finally, Linkzone integrates a feedback mechanism to further improve the recommendation accuracy.