Random Walk Based Inverse Influence Research in Online Social Networks

In online social networks, social influence of a user reflects his or her reputation or importance in the whole network or to a personalized user. Social influence analysis can be used in many real applications, such as link prediction, friend recommendation and personalized searching. Personalized Page Rank, which ranks nodes according to the probabilities that a random walk starting from a personalized node stops at all nodes, is one of the most popular metrics for influence analysis. In this paper, we study the problem of inverse influence in online social networks. Different from Personalized Page Rank, the inverse influence for a personalized node ranks nodes according to the probabilities that all nodes stop at the personalized node in limited steps. We propose two computation models for inverse influence, i.e., the random walk based and the path based. Both of the models have high computation complexity, and cannot be used in large graphs, so we propose a Monte Carlo based approximation algorithm. Experiments from synthetic and real world datasets show that, our algorithm has equivalent or even better accuracy than related researches in link prediction, and thus can be used in friend recommendation in online social networks.