On Member Labelling in Social Networks

Abstract

Software agents are increasingly used to search for experts, recommend resources, assess opinions, and other similar tasks in the context of social networks, which requires to have accurate information that describes the features of the members of the network. Unfortu-nately, many member profiles are incomplete, which has motivated many authors to work on automatic member labelling, that is, on techniques that can infer the null features of a member from his or her neighbour-hood. Current proposals are based on local or global approaches; the former compute predictors from local neighbourhoods, whereas the lat-ter analyse social networks as a whole. Their main problem is that they tend to be inefficient and their effectiveness degrades significantly as the percentage of null labels increases. In this paper, we present Katz, which is a novel hybrid proposal to solve the member labelling problem using neural networks. Our experiments prove that it outperforms other pro-posals in the literature in terms of both effectiveness and efficiency.