Social status refers to the relative position within the society. It is an important notion in sociology and related research. The problem of measuring social status has been studied for many years. Various indicators are proposed to assess social status of individuals, including educational attainment, occupation, and income wealth. However, these indicators are sometimes difficult to collect or measure. We investigate social networks for alternative measures of social status. Online activities expose certain traits of users in the real world. We are interested in how these activities are related to social status, and how social status can be predicted with social network data. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study on connecting online activities with social status in reality. In particular, we focus on the network structure of microblogs in this study. A user following another implies some kind of status. We cast the predicted social status of users to the "status" of real-world entities, e.g., universities, occupations, and regions, so that we can compare and validate predicted results with facts in the real world. We propose an efficient algorithm for this task and evaluate it on a dataset consisting of 3.4 million users from Sina Weibo. The result shows that it is possible to predict social status with reasonable accuracy using social network data. We also point out challenges and limitations of this approach, e.g., inconsistence between online popularity and real-world status for certain users. Our findings provide insights on analyzing online social status and future designs of ranking schemes for social networks.
Membership inference can be considered as a user profiling problem, where missing attributes are inferred from known attributes and network structure. Several works are built on the idea of propagation. ( backstrom2010 ) proposed an algorithm specialized to locations. ( mislove2010 ) infer user profiles in a university by applying a graph clustering algorithm. However, members of the detected cluster do not necessarily share the same attribute. Pennacchiotti and Popescu ( pennacchiotti2011 ) proposed a hybrid algorithm to infer binary attributes, by combining machine learning methods and propagation on networks. More complicated models are proposed to capture the correlation between different types of attributes @cite_28 , and the relationship between node and edge @cite_19 . Limitations of the user profiling problem were discussed in @cite_10 .
@cite_28 @cite_19 @cite_10
1968103943 2107961038 68298479
User attributes, such as occupation, education, and location, are important for many applications. In this paper, we study the problem of profiling user attributes in social network. To capture the correlation between attributes and social connections, we present a new insight that social connections are discriminatively correlated with attributes via a hidden factor -- relationship type. For example, a user's colleagues are more likely to share the same employer with him than other friends. Based on the insight, we propose to co-profile users' attributes and relationship types of their connections. To achieve co-profiling, we develop an efficient algorithm based on an optimization framework. Our algorithm captures our insight effectively. It iteratively profiles attributes by propagation via certain types of connections, and profiles types of connections based on attributes and the network structure. We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate our algorithm. The results show that our algorithm profiles various attributes accurately, which improves the state-of-the-art methods by 12 . Online social networks are now a popular way for users to connect, express themselves, and share content. Users in today's online social networks often post a profile, consisting of attributes like geographic location, interests, and schools attended. Such profile information is used on the sites as a basis for grouping users, for sharing content, and for suggesting users who may benefit from interaction. However, in practice, not all users provide these attributes. In this paper, we ask the question: given attributes for some fraction of the users in an online social network, can we infer the attributes of the remaining users? In other words, can the attributes of users, in combination with the social network graph, be used to predict the attributes of another user in the network? To answer this question, we gather fine-grained data from two social networks and try to infer user profile attributes. We find that users with common attributes are more likely to be friends and often form dense communities, and we propose a method of inferring user attributes that is inspired by previous approaches to detecting communities in social networks. Our results show that certain user attributes can be inferred with high accuracy when given information on as little as 20 of the users. In order to address privacy concerns, many social media websites allow users to hide their personal profiles from the public. In this work, we show how an adversary can exploit an online social network with a mixture of public and private user profiles to predict the private attributes of users. We map this problem to a relational classification problem and we propose practical models that use friendship and group membership information (which is often not hidden) to infer sensitive attributes. The key novel idea is that in addition to friendship links, groups can be carriers of significant information. We show that on several well-known social media sites, we can easily and accurately recover the information of private-profile users. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that uses link-based and group-based classification to study privacy implications in social networks with mixed public and private user profiles. Suppose that a Facebook user, whose age is hidden or missing, likes Britney Spears. Can you guess his her age? Knowing that most Britney fans are teenagers, it is fairly easy for humans to answer this question. Interests (or "likes") of users is one of the highly-available on-line information. In this paper, we show how these seemingly harmless interests (e.g., music interests) can leak privacy sensitive information about users. In particular, we infer their undisclosed (private) attributes using the public attributes of other users sharing similar interests. In order to compare user-defined interest names, we extract their semantics using an ontologized version of Wikipedia and measure their similarity by applying a statistical learning method. Besides self-declared interests in music, our technique does not rely on any further information about users such as friend relationships or group belongings. Our experiments, based on more than 104K public profiles collected from Facebook and more than 2000 private profiles provided by volunteers, show that our inference technique efficiently predicts attributes that are very often hidden by users. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that user interests are used for profiling, and more generally, semantics-driven inference of private data is addressed.