Finding Strong Groups of Friends among Friends in Social Networks

Over the past few years, the rapid growth and the exponential use of social digital media has led to an increase in popularity of social networks and the emergence of social computing. In general, social networks are structures made of social entities (e.g., individuals) that are linked by some specific types of interdependency such as friendship. Most users of social media (e.g., Face book, Google+, Linked In, My Space, Twitter) have many linkages in terms of friends, connections, and/or followers. Among all these linkages, some of them are more important than another. For instance, some friends of a user may be casual ones who acquaintances met him at some points in time, whereas some others may be friends that care about him in such a way that they frequently post on his wall, view his updated profile, send him messages, invite him for events, and/or follow his tweets. In this paper, we apply data mining techniques to social networks to help users of the social digital media to distinguish these important friends from a large number of friends in their social networks.