Similarities of Frequent Following Patterns and Social Entities

Social network sites such as Twitter and Facebook are used for sharing knowledge and information among users. As social networks grow larger, it becomes difficult for a user to find frequently followed group of social entities. Recently, the frequent following pattern (FFP) mining concept and method were proposed to extract patterns of the relationship between a set of following entities and their most frequently followed entities. In this paper, we propose two similarity definitions: FFP similarity and FFP-based Entity (FbE) similarity. These similarities can be used to recommend a new appropriate social entity to a "read-only-user". In other words, these similarities can be defined only with followed-and-following (F-F) relationships and without additional information such as entity characteristics or entity access logs. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to define these similarity definitions for social entity recommendations. Some examples show the effectiveness of our similarity definitions by checking their satisfaction of established requirement. (C) 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B. V.