Mining User´s Real Social Circle in Microblog

As a media and communication platform, microblog is more and more popular around the world. Users can follow anyone ranges from well-known individuals to real friends, and read their tweets without their permission. Most users follow a large number of celebrities and public media in microblog, however, these celebrities do not necessarily follow all their fans. Such one-way relationship abounds in the user network and is displayed in the forms of users´ followees and followers, which make it difficult to identify users´ real friends who are contained in the merged list of followees and followers. The aim of this paper is to propose a general algorithm for mining users´ real friends in social media and dividing them into different social circles automatically according to the closeness of their relationships. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm, we build a microblog application which presents the social circles for users identified by the algorithm and enable users to modify the proposed results according to her/his real social circles. We demonstrate that our algorithm is superior to traditional clustering method in terms of F measure and Mean Average Precision.