creators_name: De Meo, Pasquale creators_name: Ferrara, Emilio creators_name: Fiumara, Giacomo type: bookchapter datestamp: 2011-10-01 00:34:22 lastmod: 2011-10-01 00:34:22 metadata_visibility: show title: Finding Similar Users in Facebook ispublished: pub subjects: comp-sci-mach-dynam-sys full_text_status: public note: ISBN: 978-1-61350-444-4 abstract: Online social networks are rapidly asserting themselves as popular services on the Web. A central point is to determine whether two distinct users can be considered similar, a crucial concept with interesting consequences on the possibility to accomplish targeted actions like, for example, political and social aggregations or commercial promotions. In this chapter we propose an approach in order to estimate the similarity of two users based on the knowledge of social ties (i.e., common friends and groups of users) existing among users, and the analysis of activities (i.e., social events) in which users are involved. For each of these indicators, we draw a local measure of user similarity which takes into account only their joint behaviours. After this, we consider the whole network of relationships among users along with local values of similarities and combine them to obtain a global measure of similarity. Such a computation is carried out by applying the Katz coefficient, a popular parameter introduced in Social Science research. Finally, similarity values produced for each social activity are merged into a unique value of similarity by applying linear regression. date: 2011 date_type: published publication: Social Networking and Community Behavior Modeling: Qualitative and Quantitative Measurement publisher: Igi Publishing refereed: TRUE citation: De Meo, Pasquale and Ferrara, Emilio and Fiumara, Giacomo (2011) Finding Similar Users in Facebook. [Book Chapter] document_url: http://cogprints.org/7634/1/Finding_similar_users-CR.pdf