User Linkage Across Anonymizd Social Networks

Abstract

Nowadays, the user linkage or link prediction task is usually based on user profile or some sensitive data (i.e., name, gender, ID, life or health insurance accounts, etc.). With the enhancement of laws and regulations, the difficulty of personal sensitive data acquisition is increasing. Moreover, the abnormal users called online water army often camouflage themselves to achieve specific goals. They often register false user information such as name, gender, age, etc. To protect privacy and satisfy the needs of camouflage, users and ISPs often hide those sensitive data (i.e., user profile). In this paper, we want to link same user in multiple social networks, which is formally defined as ULASN (User Linkage across Anonymized Social Networks) problem. ULASN is very challenging to address due to (1) the lack of enough ground-truth to build models and obtain accurate prediction results, (2) the studied networks are anonymized, where no user profile or sensitive data is available, and (3) the need of scalable algorithms for user linkage task in large-scale social nateworks, and (4) users in social network are interrelated. To resolve these challenges, a noval user linkage framework based on social structures called ULA is proposed in this paper. ULA tackles these problems by considering massive, low-quality and interrelated user information. It uses few ground-truth to partition users into blocks, which reduces the size of candidates. By extending Fellegi-Sunter methods, our proposed algorithm can handle social network similarity complying to continuous distributions. A probabilistic generative model is proposed and solved by EM algorithm. Simultaneously, missing value problem can also solved when we use EM algorithm to learning parameters. Extensive experiments conducted on two real-world social networks demonstrate that ULA can perform very well in solving ULASN problem.

This work is supported by the Initial Scientific Research Foud of Introduced Talents in Anhui Polytechnic University (No. 2017YQQ015) and Natural Science Foundation of Anhui Province (No. 1608085MF147).