WMRA Graph-based Algorithm for Friend Recommendation

Shuchuan Lo Department of Industrial & Management National Taipei University of Technology Taipei, Taiwan 106 R.O.C. sclo@ntut.edu.tw Abstract
More and more people make friends on the Internet. Most of the community websites generate the friend recommendation lists by search engine. Search engine is not an efficient mechanism because the database is too huge that search engine produces many unnecessary and unordered friend lists. However, there is little research discussing the issue of the recommendation quality of friend on the Internet. In this study, we propose a new recommendation algorithm named weighted minimum-message ratio (WMR) which generates a limited, ordered and personalized friend lists by the real message interaction number among web members. We chose 30 potential members from a community website as our experimental cases in this study. The result shows that the best recommended friend number for a target member is 15 and the precision and recall are 15% and 8% for testing prediction, respectively. This result is acceptable compared with book recommendation in which the testing precision and recall are 3% and 14%, respectively.

Chingching Lin Math Group of General Education Center National Taipei University of Technology Taipei, Taiwan 106 R.O.C. lincc@ntut.edu.tw
members might get too many friend lists fitting the search criteria through search engine. Most of time, these lists are considerably the ones that he or she will like. That people handle information overload does not only appear in friend seeking but many other fields on the Internet. Too much information prevents customers from searching interests efficiently and much of this information is not relevant to a specific customer. Some researchers tried to propose new filters to recommend information or guess customers requirement actively and personally. Content-based and collaborative-based methods are two main underlying techniques used in recommendation system. Content-based methods require textual descriptions of the items to recommended and draw on results from both information retrieval and machine learning research. In general, a content-based system analyzes a set of documents rated by an individual user and uses the content of these documents, as well as the provided ratings, to infer a profile that can be used to recommend additional items of interest. In contrast, collaborative methods recommend items based on aggregated user ratings of those items, i.e. these techniques do not depend on the availability of textual descriptions. Both approaches share the common goal of assisting in the users search for items of interest not users themselves. Our goal is to recommend a limited and ordered friend lists to a target user. Contend-based and collaborative-based methods are not suitable for friend recommendation. In this research, we proposed a graph-based method named Weighted Minimum-message Ratio (WMR) whose recommendation index is generated by the real communication number among web users. Communication number is more representative than most of the population variables because they are lack of diversity. For example, most of the members on community websites are students aged from 15 to 25 [1].

1. INTRODUCTION
Many popular entrance or community websites, such as Yahoo.com, Amazon.com and Msn.com, provide friend making service because they believe that friend network will increase the diversification of website and strengthen the loyalty of web members. Some friend communities also believe that friends can stimulate the intention of customer visiting and merchandise consuming. Search engine is a common technique used in friend seeking. Web members usually use some population characters to filter their interests, for example, such as age, sex, occupation and living area. Due to the huge volume of member database, web

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The article is organized as follows. Section 2 provides the literature review of recommend methods and evaluation indexes. Our main theory of WMR is given in Section 3. Section 4 is the evaluations of WMR by an experimental real life data from a community website. Section 5 is our concluding remarks.

2. LITERATURE REVIEW
2.1. Context-based Recommendation
The content-based approach to recommendation has its roots in the information retrieval (IR) community, and employs many of the same techniques. Text documents are recommended based on a comparison between their content and a user profile. Data structures for both of these are created using features extracted from the text of the documents. Often some weighting scheme is used which gives high weights to discriminating words. When a page for a user has been picked, it can be shown to them and feed back of some kind elicited. If the user liked a page, weights for the words extracted from it can be added to the weights for the corresponding words in the user profile, this process is known as relevance feed back. As well as being simple and fast, it is empirically known to give improved results in a normal IR setting [2]. Many alternative methods exist both for weighting words or other features from the text and for updating user profiles. Examples of contend-based system are InfoFinder [3] and NewsWeeder [4].

also known as nearest-neighbor or user-based collaborative filtering are more popular and widely used in practice. Model-based collaborative filtering algorithms provide item recommendation by first developing a model of user ratings. Algorithms in this category take a probabilistic approach and envision the collaborative filtering process as computing the expected value of a user prediction, given his/her ratings on other items. The model building process is performed by different machine learning algorithms such as Bayesian network [11], clustering [11] [12] [13], and rule-based approaches [14].

2.3. Hybrid Recommendation and Others

Some researchers proposed hybrid recommendation method to compromise the advantages and disadvantages of content-based and collaborative recommendation approaches [15] [16]. Some researchers also attempt to explore other recommendation techniques [17] or other non-textual data [18].

2.4. Evaluation Index of Recommender System

There are three indexes in the quality evaluation of recommender system, that is, recall, precision and F1 metric [14] [19] [20]. Recall is the ratio of recommendation lists to the real future happenings of a target user. The area A plus the area B is the real behaviors in Figure 1. The area B is the part also appearing in the recommendation lists. Therefore, recall = B / (A + B). Precision is the ratio of correct guess in all the recommendations. The correct guess is area B and the whole recommendation is area B plus area C in Figure 1. Precision = B / (B + C). In general, if we give more recommendations, then the more possibility correct guess about users interests. Therefore, recall increases but precision decreases contrary. In order to average recall and precision, we use the standard F1

2.2. Collaborative Recommendation

The goal of a collaborative filtering algorithm [5] [6] [7] [8] is to suggest new items for a particular user based on the users previous transaction history and the opinions of other similar-interest users. Opinions can be explicitly given by the user as a rating score of item or can be implicitly derived from purchase records, by analyzing timing logs, by mining web navigation path and so on [9] [10]. Researchers have devised a number of collaborative filtering algorithms that can be divided into two main categories Memory-based (user-based) and Model-based (item-based) algorithms [11]. Memory-based collaborative filtering algorithms utilize the entire user-item database to generate a prediction. These systems employ statistical techniques to find a set of users that have a history of agreeing with the target user (i.e., they either rate different items similarly or they tend to buy similar set of items). Once a group of users is formed, these systems use different algorithms to combine the preferences of group members to produce a prediction or top-N recommendation for the target user. The techniques,

Figure 1. Recall and Precision

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metric that gives an equal weight to both measures and 2 * recall * precision is computed as F1 = . recall + precision

3. RESEARCH METHOD
3.1. Attribute Choosing
Our study is to provide personalized and ordered friend recommendations. The first job is to analyze which characters are suitable for friend recommendation. From the report of Lo [1] shows population variables (age, education, income ) have highly homogeneity. For example, the age of 85% web members is from 15 to 25 in our testing database of community website. Due to lack of heterogeneity in population variables, we try to seek some other characters among people relationships in real life. If there is no interaction between two persons, it is hard to call them friends. We believe it also works on the Internet. In this study, we only chose the most intuitive characterinteraction number to represent the strength of friendship. Basically, we assume that the more interactions have the stronger relationship. Some people might argue the interaction should be both side. If one side gives many messages and the other side has little response. It could be a kind of harassment, not relationship. Therefore, we chose conservatively the minimum interaction number as the strength of relationship in this research.

3.2. Data Analysis and Preprocessing

Our testing database is from a community website in Taiwan. We collected two month data from May 1, 2004 to July 7, 2004. There are total 317,171 messages issued from 7,620 web members in this period. We connected all members by messages forming a big and complex network. There are 7,144 nodes and 78,390 arcs in this network. The other members formed several two-node Table 1. Member Network after Weak-Arc Elimination Distribution of Member Network Cut the arc with A big network has 5,383 nodes and one message several small networks are formed by twos or threes. There are 1,782 single points. Cut the arc with A big network has 3,604 nodes and two messages several small networks are formed by twos or threes. There are 3,531 single points. Cut the arc with A big network has 2,702 nodes and three messages several small networks are formed by twos or threes. There are 4,443 single points.

networks. We attempted to cut weak arcs with message number equal to 1, 2 and 3. The results are shown in Table 1. In beginning, we supposed that members might group as several medium size networks. But it was not true in our experimental dataset. We cut some weak arcs but only peeled the skin of this original network. From the famous research of Milgram in the social network [21], proposed that two Americans acquainted each other only through the most 6-level intermediaries. It makes no sense to get recommendations from a big and complex network as mentioned in Table 1. Therefore, we used the target user as a root to expend 5 levels forming a candidate network. The nodes in the first level are friends of the target user whom had interaction already. The second level is friends of the first level but not the target user, and so forth. An example is shown in Figure 2. In Figure 2 (a), we can observe some members with unbalanced interaction. We took minimum messages between each pair of nodes, for example, the minimum messages between node A and node C is 4. We took off the directions of arcs after taking the minimum messages. If the minimum message is zero, then there is no arc between these two nodes. The minimum-message candidate network is shown as Figure 2 (b). We can input this network into our WMR algorithm to get the ordered recommendations directly. There is an assumption in WMR algorithm, that the longer the path, the lower the recommendation. This assumption fits the observation of Milgram [21]. The interaction on the same level causes the intermediary increasing. In Figure 2 (b), the member A can acquaint member D directly through member B, noted as P(D A) = (A, B, D). But it also can be through the path P(D A) = (A, C, B, D). It seems to be redundant and unnecessary by adding an extra intermediary C. Therefore, we eliminate the interactions between same-level nodes as shown in Figure 2 (c).

Figure 2 (a). Original Interaction Network

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3.3.2. Weighted Minimum-message Ratio. We assume that the more messages the stronger the relationship between members (nodes). We propose a Friend recommended ratio based on the strength of interaction. In Figure 2 (c), node C has more messages than node B, that is CAC > CAB. Node D and node H has equal messages from their parent node B and node C, CBD = CCH = 2, respectively. Due to parent node C has stronger relationship than parent node B to the target node A, we suggested that node H should have higher recommended score than node D. Another example, node G is the only member who is the same friend of node B and node C. Node G should get higher recommendation than node D, H and I in this case. Node J is the friend of node G who has the highest possibility becoming a friend of node A. We think node J should get higher score than node K who is the friend of node H. Our recommended score should agree with these observations in this network of Figure 2 (c). In beginning, we attempted to use C ( Si 1 , Si ) ,
i

Figure 2 (b). Candidate Network with Minimum

Message

Figure 2 (c). Candidate Network without Same-level

Interaction

3.3. The Weighted Minimum-message RatioRecommend Algorithm

Our algorithm is based on the minimum message candidate network without interactions on the same level. All the examples are based on the network in Figure 2 (c). 3.3.1. Definition of Notation Cij: the number of messages between the parent node i and child node j, for example, CBD=2. L(h): all the nodes belong to the level h in the candidate network, for example, L(1) = {B,C}. Pk(j): the kth path stared from root (the target user) to any node j, for example, P1(G) = {A, B, G} and P2(G) ={A, C, G}. Pk (j).CSum: the total messages of path Pk(j), for example, P1(G).CSum = CAB + CBG = 3 + 3 = 6. L(h).CSum: the total messages of L(h), for example, L(1).CSum= CAB + CAC = 3 + 4 = 7. C(i, j): the proportion of message Cij and total messages of the level h where node j L(h) and i L(h-1), i is the parent node of node j, for example, C(A, B) = CAB 3 / L(1).CSum = . 7 Roj: the recommended score of node j to node o, in WMR, all the recommendations being aimed at the root node (the target user) and j L(1) .

Si Pk ( j ) L(i ) , i = 1, , h-1, as the recommended ratio of node j to the root node o. But this intuitive idea ignored the real volume of messages, such as the CAB = 3 3 and L(1).CSum = 7, then C(A, B) = ; but if CAB = 7 3 30 and L(1).CSum = 70, C(A, B) = also. Therefore, 7 proportion can not reveal the strength completely. We added the total message volume of the Pk( j) in our formula as
Ro,j = [ Pk ( j ).CSum* C ( Si 1 , Si )] ,
k i

(1)

Si Pk ( j ) L(i ) , i = 1, , h-1, where j L(h) and h 1. After we calculated all recommended scores for all nodes except the nodes in L(1) because they are friends of the root node, we ordered these weighted ratios to make an ordered lists for the target user. The calculations of recommended score for node G are demonstrated in below. There are two paths from root to node G, P1(G) = {A, B, G} and P2(G) ={A, C, G}. The total messages of path P1(G) and P2(G) are P1(G).CSum = 6 and P2(G).CSum = 6, respectively. Node G belongs to level 2, therefore the nodes for level h < 2 is L(1) = {B, C}. The total messages of L(1) is L(1).CSum = 7. For P1 (G) L(1) = {B} and P2 (G) L(1) = {C}, the relative C(A, B) = 3/7 and C(A, C) = 4/7, respectively. The recommended ratio, RAG = P1(G).CSum * C(A, B) + P2(G).CSum * C(A, C) = 6 * (3/7) + 6 * (4/7) = 6.

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Table 2. Ordered Recommendation Lists to Node A Recommend Order 1 2 3 4 5 6 Member G I H D J K Recommend Score 6.00 4.00 3.43 2.14 1.62 0.76

Table 3. Part Input Records of WMR Message Sender zoe3320 tobby566 a8923448 zoe3320 elm4j03 unimatic catherine527914 b0919439555 candy030804 peggy7369 Message Receiver unimatic ki_yeah tobby566 tobby566 ki_yeah mimi1030 tobby566 unimatic tobby566 unimatic # of Message 165 100 82 89 66 99 78 78 89 87

For another example node K, there is only one path from node A to node K, P1(K) = {A, C, H, K} and P1(K).CSum = 8. The node K L(3) = {J, K}, L(2) = {D, G, H, I} and L(2).CSum = 12; P (K) L(1) = {C} 1 and P (K) L(2) = {H}. By the WMR, the relative C(A, 1 C) = 4/7, C(C, H) = 2/12. Then the RAK = P1(K).CSum * (C(A, C) * C(C, H)) = 8 *(4/7 * 2/12) = 0.76. The ordered recommendation lists are in Table 2. The order agreed with our analysis earlier.

4. EXPERIMENTAL STUDY
4.1. Experimental Environment and Data Process
4.1.1 Development Environment In this study, we used a Personal Computer with P4-3.2GHZ CPU and 512MB RAM to be our hardware environment. The operation system is Microsoft Windows XP. The recommender system was developed in Visual Basic 6.0 and MSSQL 2000. 4.1.2 Data Background. The experimental data come from a community website in Taiwan. The period of data is from May 1, 2004 to July 7, 2004 with total 317,171 messages issued by 7,620 distinct members. We divided the whole messages into two parts; one part is from May 1, 2004 to May 30, 2004 to be the training data, the other is from June 1, 2004 to July 7, 2004 to be the testing data. The former has 114,969 messages and the latter has 202,202 messages. After pruning off the same level messages, self messages, one side messages and blank messages, there are 14,398 records with three attributes, that is, message sender, message receiver and number of message. We input these records as the original input of our recommender system. Figure 3 is our data transformation form of WMR recommender system. From Figure 3, we chose the minimizing number of message as our experimental condition. Parts of input records after data transformation are shown in Table 3.

4.1.3 Testing Samples. Reichheld (1996) pointed out that a business spends 5 to 10 times more cost on attracting a new customer than maintaining an old customer [22]. Consequently, businesses can obtain great benefits if they take account of the research on customer relationship management (CRM). From Los study [1], she used rescaled consuming-behavior variables: recency, frequency and monetary to segment customers into five clusters by K-means method shown in Table 4. She pooled the actives and potentials and re-clustered by K-means again shown as Table 5. Cluster averages of each variable are listed in the body of Table 4 and Table 5. There were 1,646 potential customers in Table 5, but only 678 customers had message records in May and June. We randomly sampled 30 customers from these 678 potential customers being our testing members. 4.2. Experimental Result and Evaluation For each testing sample, we made 5 to 30 recommendations. Some of 30 recommendation lists for one of our 30 testing customers are exhibited in Figure 4. All these lists were predictions because we did not recommend these lists in practice. We just compared the lists with the testing data. The recall, precision and F1 metric are shown in Table 6. Diagrams of recall, precision and F1 metric are exhibited in Figure 5, 6 and 7, respectively. From Figure 5, we can observe the more recommendations, the higher recall ratios. From Figure 6, the more recommendations, whereas the lower precision ratios. The F1 metric is about the same after 15 recommendations in Figure 7. We chose 15 recommendations as our quantity of recommendation in order to balance the recall and precision where recall = 14.7% and precision = 8%. In this study, we attempted to give a comparison of recall and precision with our experimental outcomes. We chose the results of a hybrid recommender system for digital library [16], where the testing precision and recall are 3% and 14% for 100 customers, respectively.

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It appears a satisfied result that our 15 recommendations can achieve the precision of near 15% compared to 3% of book recommendations. The precision and recall of these two studies are predictions compared with a testing data (future data). We also want to examine the effect of list order in this study. The hypotheses Ho: PF5 = PL5 vs. H1: PF5 > PL5 is to test the order effect, where PF5 is the average recall or precision of first 5 recommendations and PL5 is those of last five. From Table 7, the first 5 recommendations had higher precision and recall than the last 5 recommendations. The proportion differences were supported by statistical significant level equal to 1% for precision and 5% for recall.

recommendations for both precision and recall. It illustrated that our recommendation mechanism can provide a personalized, ordered and limited recommendation lists for each individual customer to increase the efficiency of information. In order to improve precision and recall, we will explore another recommendation algorithm in future research. We only use the number of message to be our analytical variable. We will search more variables to increase the information volume between friends in future research also.

5. CONCLUSION AND FUTURE RESEARCH

There is little research on friend recommendation. In this study, we proposed a graph-based friend recommendation algorithm, WMR. This algorithm is based on the general concept of friend introducing friend in real word. We think that more interactions between friends represent stronger relationships. If a friend has more interactions with the target user, he/she should get higher score in our recommendation algorithm. Our algorithm chose minimum messages as our relation strength between members. We developed our algorithm and interface under Visual Basic 6.0 and MSSQL 2000. This system generated 5-level network from each of 30 testing web users and created 5 to 30 recommendation lists for each users. The average precision is around 15% and average recall is 8% for our 15 recommendations in our experimental prediction. Due to no practical recommendations in this experiment, we can not expect the true precision and recall. Even though our testing precision and recall are not too high, they are acceptable as compared with book recommender system based on hybrid algorithm (combined content-based method and collaborative-based method) for digital library with 3% precision and 14% recall. In this study, we also tested the effect of recommendation order. There were statistical significance on the proportion differences of the first 5 recommendations and the last five

Figure 3. Recommender System Based on WMR

Figure 4. One Example with 30 Recommendations

Table 4. Customer Segment in First Stage Based on K-means Clusters Active Potential Chance Danger Churn Total Recency 1.903148 3.309834 5.483357 23.53709 47.97032 Frequency 41.31477 17.32109 4.527017 4.142617 3.037697 Amount 90.9322 46.93898 22.53213 16.1419 11.48234 Members 413 1,688 6,459 4,165 3,369 16,094 Percentage 2.57% 10.49% 40.13% 25.88% 20.93% 100%

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Table 5. Customer Segment in Second Stage Based on K-means Clusters High Frequency High Consuming Potential Total Recency 2.054054 2.082353 3.302552 Frequency 41.62432 28.8 17.28554 Amount 53.55135 379.9647 39.29344 Members 370 85 1,646 2,101 Percentage 17.61% 4.05% 78.34% 100%

Table 6. Recommend Evaluation Indexes # of Recom. Precision Recall F1 5 10 15 20 25 30

0.186 0.173 0.147 0.123 0.111 0.107 0.03 0.06 0.08 0.09 0.1 0.116

0.056 0.09 0.104 0.104 0.105 0.112

Table 7. Tests of Precision and Recall for First 5 and

Last 5 Recommendations

pF 5 Precision Recall 0.1867 0.0329

p L5 0.0933 0.0189

Statistic Z 2.335*** 2.23** Figure 6. Precisions Prediction

Note: *** with 1% statistical significance ** with 5% statistical significance

Figure 7. F1 Metrics Prediction Figure 5. Recall Prediction

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