What online social networks may know about non-members
Monday, April 30, 2012 - 15:30
in Mathematics & Economics
(Phys.org) -- What can social networks on the internet know about persons who are friends of members, but have no user profile of their own? Researchers from the Interdisciplinary Center for Scientific Computing of Heidelberg University studied this question. Their work shows that through network analytical and machine learning tools the relationships between members and the connection patterns to non-members can be evaluated with regards to non-member relationships. Using simple contact data, it is possible, under certain conditions, to correctly predict that two non-members know each other with approx. 40 percent probability.