A Multilevel Inference Mechanism for User Attributes over Social Networks

Hang Zhang, Yajun Yang, Xin Wang, Hong Gao, Qinghua Hu, Dan Yin

Abstract: In a real social network, each user has attributes for self-description called user attributes which are semantically hierarchical. With these attributes, we can implement personalized services such as user classification and targeted recommendations. Most traditional approaches mainly focus on the flat inference problem without considering the semantic hierarchy of user attributes which will cause serious inconsistency in multilevel tasks. To address these issues, in this paper, we propose a cross-level model called IWM. It is based on the theory of maximum entropy which collects attribute information by mining the global graph structure. Meanwhile, we propose a correction method based on the predefined hierarchy to realize the mutual correction between different layers of attributes. Finally, we conduct extensive verification experiments on the DBLP data set and it has been proved that compared with other algorithms, our method has a superior effect.