text: Network alignment aims at inferring a set of anchor links matching the shared entities between different information networks, which has become a prerequisite step for effective fusion of multiple information networks. In this paper, we will study the network alignment problem to fuse online social networks specifically. Social network alignment is extremely challenging to address due to several reasons, i.e., lack of training data, network heterogeneity and one-to-one constraint. Existing network alignment works usually require a large number of training data, but such a demand can hardly be met in applications, as manual anchor link labeling is extremely expensive. Significantly different from other homogeneous network alignment works, information in online social networks is usually of heterogeneous categories, the incorporation of which in model building is not an easy task. Furthermore, the one-to-one cardinality constraint on anchor links renders their inference process intertwistingly correlated. To resolve these three challenges, a novel network alignment model, namely ActiveIter, is introduced in this paper. ActiveIter defines a set of inter-network meta diagrams for anchor link feature extraction, adopts active learning for effective label query and uses greedy link selection for anchor link cardinality filtering. Extensive experiments are conducted on real-world aligned networks datasets, and the experimental results have demonstrated the effectiveness of ActiveIter compared with other state-of-the-art baseline methods.
  @cite_23: Most real systems consist of a large number of interacting, multi-typed components, while most contemporary researches model them as homogeneous networks, without distinguishing different types of objects and links in the networks. Recently, more and more researchers begin to consider these interconnected, multi-typed data as heterogeneous information networks, and develop structural analysis approaches by leveraging the rich semantic meaning of structural types of objects and links in the networks. Compared to widely studied homogeneous network, the heterogeneous information network contains richer structure and semantic information, which provides plenty of opportunities as well as a lot of challenges for data mining. In this paper, we provide a survey of heterogeneous information network analysis. We will introduce basic concepts of heterogeneous information network analysis, examine its developments on different data mining tasks, discuss some advanced topics, and point out some future research directions.
  @cite_31: Nowadays, many new social networks offering specific services spring up overnight. In this paper, we want to detect communities for emerging networks. Community detection for emerging networks is very challenging as information in emerging networks is usually too sparse for traditional methods to calculate effective closeness scores among users and achieve good community detection results. Meanwhile, users nowadays usually join multiple social networks simultaneously, some of which are developed and can share common information with the emerging networks. Based on both link and attribution information across multiple networks, a new general closeness measure, intimacy, is introduced in this paper. With both micro and macro controls, an effective and efficient method, CAD (Cold stArt community Detector), is proposed to propagate information from developed network to calculate effective intimacy scores among users in emerging networks. Extensive experiments conducted on real-world social networks demonstrate that CAD can perform very well in addressing the emerging network community detection problem.
  @cite_13: Online social networks have gained great success in recent years and many of them involve multiple kinds of nodes and complex relationships. Among these relationships, social links among users are of great importance. Many existing link prediction methods focus on predicting social links that will appear in the future among all users based upon a snapshot of the social network. In real-world social networks, many new users are joining in the service every day. Predicting links for new users are more important. Different from conventional link prediction problems, link prediction for new users are more challenging due to the following reasons: (1) differences in information distributions between new users and the existing active users (i.e., old users); (2) lack of information from the new users in the network. We propose a link prediction method called SCAN-PS (Supervised Cross Aligned Networks link prediction with Personalized Sampling), to solve the link prediction problem for new users with information transferred from both the existing active users in the target network and other source networks through aligned accounts. We proposed a within-target-network personalized sampling method to process the existing active users' information in order to accommodate the differences in information distributions before the intra-network knowledge transfer. SCAN-PS can also exploit information in other source networks, where the user accounts are aligned with the target network. In this way, SCAN-PS could solve the cold start problem when information of these new users is total absent in the target network.
  @cite_12: The influence maximization problem aims at finding a subset of seed users who can maximize the spread of influence in online social networks (OSNs). Existing works mostly focus on one single homogenous network. However, in the real world, OSNs (1) are usually heterogeneous, via which users can influence each others in multiple channels; and (2) share common users, via whom information could propagate across networks.
summary: Across the aligned networks, various application problems have been studied. Cross-site heterogeneous link prediction problems are studied by @cite_13 by transferring links across partially aligned networks. Besides link prediction problems, Jin and proposes to partition multiple large-scale social networks simultaneously in @cite_31 . The problem of information diffusion across partially aligned networks is studied by in @cite_12 , where the traditional LT diffusion model is extended to the multiple heterogeneous information setting. give a comprehensive survey about the existing works on heterogeneous information networks in @cite_23 , which includes a section talking about network information fusion works and related application problems in detail.