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Today, with the expansion of online social networks and their impact on various aspects of human life, investigating the interactions between users and identifying influential users for various advertising applications and accelerating or preventing the dissemination of information has been the focus of researchers. One of the fundamental researches is investigating the fact that the similarity of users' characteristics along with their interests leads to new relationships in the friendship network, a concept known as homophily. The study of homophily can provide significant insight into the flow of information and behaviors in a community to analyze the formation of online communities. In recent years, the emergence of location-based social networks (LBSNs) has created massive datasets by sharing spatial and temporal information better than ever before. This issue enables researchers to analyze the behavioral patterns of users and their impact on their social connections and friends. Throughout the present paper, a framework is being defined to examine the effect of combining structural similarity and homophily in determining users' social influence under two scenarios. The experiments simulate performance of nodes on three LBSNs: Gowalla, Foursquare, and Brightkite. By calculating the correlation coefficient for the similarity methods applied, it can be displayed that with the increase in homophily, the correlation of the proposed method and the social influence increases. A new measure of centrality is also introduced by using the topological structure of the user's communication network, such as the eigenvector centrality along with the values of friendship influence and the number of spatial movements of the user. The results show that our proposed centrality matches up to 85% with baseline methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, the analysis of heterogeneous networks has become more popular due to the growing number of social networks. These networks are capable of covering a variety of nodes and edges. The members of these networks usually have metadata whose analysis can lead to the discovery of knowledge. One way to analyze such data is clustered where high-quality clustering requires effective similarity calculation. Most of the existing clustering methods do not pay attention to the use of metadata or the characteristics of network members. On the other hand, they are only able to process small and medium-sized networks due to the amount of memory and execution speed. This paper presents a hybrid approach for heterogeneous network clustering to overcome these problems. The structural similarity in this approach is calculated by the graph embedding method, which we call learning-based. Attribute similarity is calculated by a scoring method that we call similarity-based. In the experimental study, we compared the proposed method with collaborative approaches based on similarity on the real-world networks. The experimental findings demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method in terms of entropy, memory consumption, execution time, and density in certain cases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A recommender system is a model that automatically recommends some meaningful cases (such as clips/films/goods/items) to the clients/people/consumers/users according to their (previous) interests. These systems are expected to recommend the items according to the users' interests. There are two traditional general recommender system models, i.e., Collaborative Filtering Recommender System (ColFRS) and Content-based Filtering Recommender System (ConFRS). Also, there is another model that is a hybrid of those two traditional recommender systems; it is called Hybrid Recommender System (HRS). An HRS usually outperforms simple traditional recommender systems. The problems such as scalability, cold start, and sparsity belong to the main problems that any recommender system should solve. The memory-based (modeless) recommender systems benefit from good accuracies. But they suffer from a lack of admissible scalability. The model-based recommender systems suffer from a lack of admissible accuracies. But they benefit from good scalability. In this paper, it is tried to propose a hybrid model based on an automatically improved ontology to solve the scalability, cold start, and sparsity problems. Our proposed HRS also uses an innovative approach of clustering as an augmented section. When there are enough ratings, it uses a collaborative filtering approach to predict the missing ratings. When there are not enough ratings, it uses a content-based filtering approach to predict the missing ratings. In the content-based filtering section of our proposed HRS, ontology concepts are used to improve the accuracy of ratings' prediction. If our target client is severely sparse, we cannot trust even the ratings predicted by the content-based filtering section of our proposed HRS. Therefore, our proposed HRS uses additive clustering to improve the prediction of the missing ratings if the target client is severely sparse. It is experimentally shown that our model outperforms many of the newly developed recommender systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, various studies have been conducted on SVMs and their applications in different area. They have been developed significantly in many areas. SVM is one of the most robust classification and regression algorithms that plays a significant role in pattern recognition. However, SVM has not been developed significantly in some areas like large-scale datasets, unbalanced datasets, and multiclass classification. Efficient SVM training in large-scale datasets is of great importance in the big data era. However, as the number of samples increases, the time and memory required to train SVM increase, making SVM impractical even for a medium-sized problem. With the emergence of big data, this problem becomes more significant. This paper presents a novel distributed method for SVM training in which a very small subset of training samples is used for classification, which reduces the problem size and thus the required memory and computational resources. The solution of this problem almost converges to standard SVM. This method includes three steps: first, detecting a subset of distributed training samples, second, creating local models of SVM and obtaining partial vectors, and finally combining the partial vectors and obtaining the global vector and the final model. In addition, the datasets which suffer from unbalanced number of samples and tend to the majority class, the proposed method balances the samples of the two classes and it can be used in unbalanced datasets. The empirical results show that using this method is efficient for large-scale problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite all the developments in recommender systems and utilizations of successful application models in the industry, it can be said that there is still a need to improve various parts of these systems in order to enhance their effectiveness and scope of application. Recommender Systems (RS) are well-known in the field of e-commerce and are expected to provide customers with important goods and items (including music and movies). In traditional recommender systems suffer from important challenges and problems such as cold start, scalability, and data dispersion. Recently, some of these challenges have been successfully overcomed to an acceptable extent by the advantages of the combined use of these methods. The K-nearest neighbors (KNN)-based Recommender Systems (KRS) are among the most powerful recommender engines that are currently available. In these systems, the rating of a target item is predicted based on the average rating of similar items, where the similarity is defined based on a similarity measure and the average rating of items is treated as a feature. In this paper, KRS is developed by combining the following approaches: (a) using the mean and variance of the item ratings as item features to identify the similar items (i.e., item-based KRS or IKRS); (b) using the mean and variance of the user ratings as the user features to identify the similar users (i.e., user-based KRS or UKRS); (c) using weighted average to combine the neighboring user/item ratings; and (d) using ensemble learning. In this study, some methods, i.e., EVMRS (Ensemble Variance-Mean based Recommender System) and EWVMRS (Ensemble Weighted Variance-Mean based Recommender System) are discussed and an improved EWVMRSG (Ensemble Weighted Variance-Mean Based Recommender system enriched by Gaussian mixture model (GMM)) is expanded, which are all user-based and involve using Mean Distance as the measure of similarity between the users/items to find neighboring users/items, but then they use unweighted average, weighted average, and weighted averaging based on the full-covariance GMM, respectively, for prediction. Experimental evaluations show that the EVMRS, EWVMRS, and EWVMRSG methods, which all use ensemble learning, are the most accurate methods among those developed and evaluated in this study. Depending on the dataset, the EWVMRSG mothed achieves a 20–30% lower absolute error than that of the original Mean based Recommender Systems (MRS). In terms of execution time, the proposed method is comparable to the original MRS models and is much faster than the Slope-one, P-kNN, and C-kNN RSs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As one of the significant issues in social networks analysis, the influence maximization problem aims to fetch a minimal set of the most influential individuals in the network to maximize the number of influenced nodes under a diffusion model. Several approaches have been proposed to tackle this NP-hard problem. The traditional approaches failed to develop an efficient and effective solution due to the exponential growth of the size of social networks (due to massive computational overhead). In this paper, a three-stage framework based on the community detection approach is devised, namely LGFIM. In the first stage, the search space was controlled by partitioning the network into communities. Simultaneously, three heuristic methods were presented for modifying the community detection algorithm to extract the optimal communities: core nodes selection, capacity constraint on communities, and communities combination. These extracted communities were highly compatible with the information propagation mechanism. The next stages apply a scalable and robust algorithm at two different levels of the network: 1. Exploring the local scope of communities to select the most influential nodes of each community and construct the potential influential nodes set 2. Exploring the global scope of the network to select the target influential nodes among potential influential nodes set. Experimental results on various real datasets proved that LGFIM could achieve remarkable results compared with the state-of-the-art algorithms, especially acceptable influence spread, much better running time, and more applicable to massive social networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]