Supervised User Ranking in Signed Social Networks

The task of user ranking in signed networks, aiming to predict potential friends and enemies for each user, has attracted increasing attention in numerous applications. Existing approaches are mainly extended from heuristics of the traditional models in unsigned networks. They suffer from two limitations: (1) mainly focus on global rankings thus cannot provide effective personalized ranking results, and (2) have a relatively unrealistic assumption that each user treats her neighbors’ social strengths indifferently. To address these two issues, we propose a supervised method based on random walk to learn social strengths between each user and her neighbors, in which the random walk more likely visits “potential friends” and less likely visits “potential enemies”. We learn the personalized social strengths by optimizing on a particularly designed loss function oriented on ranking. We further present a fast ranking method based on the local structure among each seed node and a certain set of candidates. It much simplifies the proposed ranking model meanwhile maintains the performance. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our approach over the state-of-the-art approaches.