2013 IEEE International Conference on High Performance Computing and Communications & 2013 IEEE International Conference
on Embedded and Ubiquitous Computing
Friendship Prediction Based on the Fusion of Topology and Geographical Features
in LBSN
Hui Luo, Bin Guo, ZhiwenYu, Zhu Wang, Yun Feng
School of Computer Science, Northwestern Polytechnical University, P. R. China
Xi’an, China
brouselh@gmail.com
Abstract—Friendship prediction in social networks is useful for
various applications, such as friend/place recommendation and
privacy management. In this paper, we propose a friendship
prediction approach by fusing the topology and geographical
features in location based social networks (LBSNs). We
investigate the features of users’ relationship both online and
offline and quantify the contributions of selected features
through information gain metric. Three key features are
selected, namely user social topology, location category, and
check-in location. Friendship is predicted based on the fusion
of the selected online/offline features. Three inference models
are selected to infer the friendship, including Random Forests,
Support Vector Machine (SVM), and Naive Bayes. The
proposed approach is validated by intensive empirical
evaluations using the collected Foursquare and Jiepang
datasets.
Keywords-LBSNs; Friendship Prediction; Social Topology;
Geographical Features; Online/Offline Interaction
I. INTRODUCTION
Location based Social Networks (LBSNs) allow users to
find where their friends are, to search location-tagged
content within their social graph, and to meet people nearby.
It helps users establish an extensive and strong contact with
the outside world. The recent surging of LBSN makes it
possible to collect large-scale data of users’ updates, leading
a stirring of interest in LBSN studies which include social
topology analysis [1,2], community mining [3-5], social
privacy protection [6], friendship prediction [7-11], etc.
For the friendship prediction, intuitively, the more similar
the users are, the more likely they will be friends in the
future. We argue that the formation of online friendship may
reflect to some degree of the real-world counterpart. In other
words, people who have mutual interests, are geographically
close, or belong to common social circles (friends of friends),
are more likely to become friends [8]. It is a challenge that
what metrics can be used to characterize these correlations.
A viable way is to select features to quantify them. As a
result, the key of friendship prediction is how to select
appropriate features. Currently, the mainstream method is to
quantify the similarity between users by introducing different
user similarity measures, and user pairs with high similarity
will be recognized as friends. However, users who are
similar to each other does not necessarily mean that they are
friends. Meanwhile, users usually have a lot of features or
attributes, a large similarity based on the selected features
may not indicate users’ overall similarity. The problem of
such an approach is that, in order to improve the accuracy of
978-0-7695-5088-6/13 $31.00
$26.00 © 2013 IEEE
DOI 10.1109/HPCC.and.EUC.2013.319
prediction, researchers have to build dedicated models for
each selected feature sets. Instead of measuring user
similarity, in this paper, we propose a classification-based
approach that leverages a fusion of online/offline features of
users for user friendship prediction.
Recently, large-scale data from LBSNs has become
available containing information about the updates of users
as well as users’ friends. While Facebook and Foursquare are
popular LBSN services worldwide, Jiepang1 and Dianping2
are two representative LBSN services in China. We collect
data from both Foursquare and Jiepang to predict friends of
users in both datasets. It is believed that users’ behavior
could be linked to the behavior of their neighbors in social
topology network [8]. In this paper, we conduct an in-depth
analysis of various characteristics of LBSNs, and select
features from both the aspects of social topology and check-
in behavior of users. For check-in behavior, we analyze both
the locations they check in and the category of these
locations. Then, we propose a friendship prediction approach
by fusing the topology and geographical features of LBSNs.
We measure the contribution of different features based
on their information gain, and select three key features
namely user social topology, location category, and check-in
location. We adopt the Bayes model to verify the
performance of the selected features by reproducing the
social topology network. Then, we propose a friendship
prediction method based on the fusion of the selected online
and offline features. Three classification models including
Random Forests, Support Vector Machine (SVM), and
Naive Bayes are adopted to predict the user’s social ties. In
summary, the main contributions of this paper are as follows:
• We investigate the valuable features of users’
relationship both from social topology network and
geography.
• We measure the contribution of different features to
users’ friendship by using the information gain
metric, and use a Bayes model to reproduce the
social topology network to verify that the selected
features characterize users’ relationship well.
• We propose a friendship prediction method based on
the fusion of the selected features. The experimental
results on two real-world datasets show the
effectiveness of the friendship prediction method.
The precision of the three classification models for
Foursquare achieves up to 64.31% and all of the
1
http://jiepang.com
2
http://www.dianping.com
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 recall achieves up to 66.68%, respectively. For the
Jiepang data set, the precision achieves up to
98.95%, and the recall up to 72.73%.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. In Section
2, we discuss the related work. Section 3 presents the method
of feature selection. Section 4 describes the approach for
friendship prediction, followed by the evaluation results in
Section 5. Finally, we conclude our work in Section 6.
II. RELATED WORK
Friendship prediction in social networks has attracted
much research recently. There are several approaches
towards friendship prediction. Schwartz and Wood proposed
an “interest distance” metric to measure the similarity of two
users’ friend circles, and cluster the users according to
similarity [9]. Gregory et al. performed hierarchical
clustering to discovering overlapping communities in
networks [12] and Grob. et al. used this algorithm to make
iterative friend recommendations from the same community
[10]. These methods only used single feature, such as social
network structure or user interest.
Some researchers try to use multiple features in
friendship prediction. Özseyhan et al. [13] used association
rule mining to suggest potential friends of users based on the
features of age, location, and income. Li et al. [14] studied
how users share their location in real world and built multi-
layered friendship model through quantifying the correlation
between users’ friendship with their mobility characteristics,
social graph properties, and user profiles [8]. Cranshaw et al.
[15] proposed a model with a set of location-based features
for friendship prediction by analyzing users’ location trails.
Sadilek et al. [11] used a regression decision tree to unify the
text similarity coefficient and co-location to improve the
performance of friendship prediction. All of these methods
use a variety of features to measure the similarity of users
rather than the users’ relationship. They all assume that two
users are friends if they are similar in terms of selected
features.
There are recently studies that calculate user intimacy
through offline interactions. For instance, Guo et al. [16]
proposed a method to predict user friendship based on inter-
user meeting frequency and duration in the physical world.
Methods of link prediction in complex networks [17] have
also been adopted to mine potential friends of users. Liben-
Nowell et al. [18] analyzed the link prediction problem for
social networks. Zhou et al. [19] used 10 types of similarity
indexes based on the local node information to make link
prediction in six real networks. Leskovec et al. [20] studied
online social networks in which relationships can be either
positive (indicating relations such as friendship) or negative
(indicating relations such as opposition or antagonism).
These methods select features from topology network to
predict potential friends of users, while our work combines
both social topology network and geography features.
III. FEATURE SELECTION
As we know, the key to friendship prediction is how to
select appropriate features. We assume the social network of
LBSN is a complete graph, where the nodes denote users, the
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edges represent user relationships. Specifically, while a solid
line means the linked users are friends, a dotted line means
not. Let G (U , E ) be an unweighted, undirected graph
s s s
representing the social topology network where each node
u ∈ U denotes a user and each edge e
s s ∈ E denotes a u 1, u 2 s
relation between a pair of users (u1, u2). Information gain is
usually a good measure for deciding the relevance of an
attribute [21], so we use information gain to select useful
features as information gain can evaluate the contribution of
selected features to users’ relationship. For target feature X
and a selected feature Y, the information gain IG(X, Y) equal
the information entropy of X minus the conditional entropy
[22] achieved by learning the state of the feature Y. It is
defined as follows:
IG ( X , Y ) = H ( X ) − H ( X | Y ) (1)
Assume X with n outcomes {x1... xn}, p(xi) is the
probability mass function of outcome xi. The information
entropy H(X) is defined as Eq. (2).
n
H ( X ) = ¦ − p( xi ) log p( xi ) (2)
i =1
Assume p( y j ) is the probability mass function outcome
y j , p( xi , y j ) is the probability that X = xi and Y = y j . The
conditional entropy H(X|Y) is defined as Eq. (3).
p( y j )
H ( X | Y ) = ¦ p ( xi , y j ) log (3)
i, j p ( xi , y j )
The data of Foursquare collected started from October
24th, 2011 and lasted for 8 weeks. It has more than 12
million check-ins performed by 720,000 anonymous users
over 3 million venues. We resort to Twitter streaming API
[23] to get the publicly shared check-ins in this work because
Foursquare API [24] provides limited authorized access for
retrieving check-in information. We also crawled metadata
related to users and venues, including every user’s Twitter
profile and every venue’s Foursquare profile. The data of
Jiepang was collected in two months from April, 2012 to
June, 2012. We used the open API [25] provided by Jiepang
and collected more than 2 million check-ins performed by
89,936 anonymous users from those who made at least one
check-in on Jiepang during the period from users’
registration time to our collection time. Both of the two
datasets include user ID and his/her friends list, check-in
time, geographic coordinate (latitude/longitude), and the
category of the location people check-in.
TABLE I. THE INFORMATION GAIN OF EACH FEATURE
Features Information gain
user social topology 0.0055
location category 0.0021
check-in location 0.0012
pairs of location people check in 0.0004
number of check in 0.0002
We selected 2,731 users who have updates in Foursquare
to calculate the information gain of selected features. The
number of friend pairs is 5,590 and non-friend pairs is
3,722,225. So the information entropy of users’ relationship
is 0.0162. In Table 1, we calculate the information gain of
five features from both social topology and geography. We
finally select the top three features for friendship prediction,
i.e., user social topology, location category, and check-in
location.
A. User social topology
Whether two people are friends has a strong relationship
with their social topology network [26]. In social topology
network, those users who have common neighbors in current
time are more likely to be friends in the future than those
who have none. If users are friends now but they have none
or few common friends, their relationship can be very weak.
In order to measure this situation we introduce a concept
called social distance as (i, j ) , to represent the shortest
C. Check-in location
Those users who have more common check-ins are more
likely to become friends than those who have none.
Especially when the number of common check-ins takes up a
large proportion of the total check-ins of users. Assuming the
check-in locations of user ui are (li1, li 2 ……, liH ) , Dist (lim , l jn )
denotes the distance between the check-in location lim of
user i and the check-in location l jn of user j. Those users are
more likely to become friends if they have more common
check-in locations than those who have none. Assuming that
two check-ins are the same place if the distance of them is
less than 0.3Km, so we ignored those distances which were
greater than 0.3Km, for each pair of user i and user j, we uses
Eq. (7) to quantify this property.
M N

a (i, j ) = ¦¦ im
distance between ui and u j in the topology, as formulated in (c + c jn ) (Ci + C j )
l m =1 n=1 (7)
Eq. (4). If user i and user j are friends, then the distance of i Dist (lim , l jn ) < 0.3
and j is 1. Otherwise, the distance is infinite. We removing
the friendship of user i and user j (if they are friends) before IV. FRIENDSHIP PREDICTION
calculating the distance of them, and then calculate the As shown in Fig. 1, the selected users form a social
shortest distance of them in user social topology. topology network. Each user has some check-ins and each
as (i, j ) = shortest _ dis (ui , u j )inGs' (U s , Es − eij ) (4) check-in has its category. We quantify the relationship of
users from the three different layers and have three features
B. Location category for each pair of users. For the three selected features, user
The categories of the locations people check-in reflect social topology is online features while both check-in
their behaviors or preferences to some extent. Users location and location category are offline features. Then, we
encounter at different locations have different meanings. build a classification model to fuse the selected features.
Generally, people who meet frequently in private locations Finally, we use the model for friendship inference and divide
are more likely to become friends than those who often meet the edges in social topology network into the edges of
in public places. In order to quantify the relationship between friendship and the edges of non-friendship.
user preference and the semantics of check-in locations. We
define the categories of locations where ui checks in as
(ti1 , ti 2 ……, tiT ) , the number of check-in of each location
category as (ci1 , ci 2 ……, ciT ) , and the total number of check-ins
of ui as Ci . Assuming that the total number of users is L,
p(k) denotes the probability user k checks in at location tik .
We introduce the concept called location information
entropy, which is defined as,
L
E(ti ) = ¦− pi (k) logp (k ) i
(5)
i=1

As we can observe from Eq. (5), if many users check in

at location l1 , and each user checks in at l1 many times, l1
may be a public place and the value of location information
entropy is larger. Users who have common check-in
locations are more likely to become friends in the future.
Taking the home of user A for example, A has the most
Figure 1. The approach for friendship prediction
number of check-in of A’s home, if user B sometimes has
check-in at this place, B is more likely to be A’s friend. If
In order to prove that the selected features are irrelevant
both A and B have check-ins in public places, there more
to classification algorithms, we adopt three classification
likely to be happen by chance. We ignored those locations
models for friendship inference, namely Random Forests
whose location information entropy are greater than 5. For
[27], SVM [28], and Naive Bayes [29]. We use Weka [30] to
each pair of user i and j, we use Eq. (6) to quantify the
implement Random Forest and Naive Bayes, and use the
location category property at . LibSVM [31] for SVM implementation.
M N
at (i, j ) = ¦¦ (cim + c jn ) (Ci + C j ) (6)
m =1 n =1 V. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS
tim =t jn andE (tim )<5
As we believe that the model of classification is effective
only when the selected features characterize users’

2226
relationship well, we use a Bayes model to reproduce the
social topology network to verify the performance of the
selected features and use the ROC curve to evaluate the
ranking performance. We also compare the modeling
performance with Multi-Layered Friendship Model [8] and
analyze the contribution of the online and offline features in
our model.
A. Feature Exploration
We assume | E | denotes the total number of the pair of
s the training data as 1:3. We select users by city. Taking
friendship, | AEs | denotes the total number of the pair of
users, av denotes a value of a feature, Pf (av ) denotes the
probability of value av for friend pairs and Pnf (av ) denotes
the probability of value av for non-friend pairs. As we know,
the pair of friends is very sparse in user social topology
network, that means | E |<<| AE | , then, we have s s
p(av ) ≈ pnf (av ) . As Bayes theorem formula shows, the
probability of the pair of users is friends is calculated in Eq.
(8).
P (av | u1u 2 ) × P (u1u2 ) Pf (av ) | Es |
P(u1u2 | av ) ≈
Pnf (av )
Assuming that F (av ) = Pf (av ) Pnf (av ) , we calculated the
probability of the three selected features, assuming the
selected features are independent of each other and ignored
O( P 2 ) and O( P 3 ) , then we have,
P(u1u2 | as at al ) = P1 + P2 + P3 = ( F1 + F2 + F3 ) × | E s | | AEs | (9)
1 friendship prediction for fifty times.
0.9
0.8 AUC=0.9401
0.7
True positives
potential friendship. The friendship in the user social
topology network is very sparse. Take the Paris check-in
dataset for example, the number of friend pairs is 5,590 and
non-friend pairs is 3,722,225. The degree of the imbalance of
data [32] is larger than 1:700. Weiss et al [33] studied the
distribution of training dataset and the performance of
classification, and showed that a relatively balanced class
distribution of training dataset will get better performance.
Thus we choose the ratio of friendship and non-friendship of
Beijing for example, in the dataset of Beijing we select those
users who have at least one check-in in Beijing and select all
check-in data of selected users.
1) Mining Potential Friendship
Mining potential friendship in the social topology
network is an important measure of friendship prediction.
We delete some friendship in the social topology randomly
and build a model for friendship prediction with
classification algorithm. We use the model to divide the
edges from social topology network into the edges of
= × (8)
Pnf (av ) | AEs | friendship and the edges of non-friendship.
We select the check-in data in Paris of Foursquare and
data in Shanghai of Jiepang for this experiment. 5% and 10%
friendship edges were deleted randomly in the two datasets
respectively. We use the three classification models to learn
and infer friendships. Using re-sampling method [32], we
randomly selected training data to build the model and make
The results of mining potential friendship are shown in
Fig. 3. As we can see that all the inference models perform
AUC=0.6654 well even with 10% friendships removed in the social
AUC=0.7051
topology network. Compared with using the data of Jiepang,

0.6
0.5
0.4
0.3
0.2
0.1
0
0 0.2 0.4
False positives
Figure 2. The ROC curves of Multi-Layered Friendship Model ranking
We selected 2,731 users who have updates in Foursquare
to build a Bayes model according to Eq. (9). We rank users’
friendship by comparing the summarization of the three
features’ value of F. As shown in Fig. 2, the area of the ROC
curve is 0.9401, which means the model reproduces the user
social topology network very well. This analysis indicates
that the three selected features characterize the relationship
of users in social topology network effectively.
B. Friendship Prediction
As we have proved that the selected features characterize
users’ relationship well, we are committed to make
friendship prediction with higher precision and recall.
We use check-in data from two real LBSNs, namely
Foursquare and Jiepang, to validate the accuracy of mining
AUC=0.9291
user social topology
location category
check-in location
three feature fusion
0.6 0.8
the model of the data of Foursquare has lower precision and
higher recall, which means that the model of the data of
Foursquare has mining more potential friendship but has
lower credibility. Also, there is not much difference between
deleting 5% friendship and 10% friendship. It means that the
geographical features make up for the lack of topology
features to some extent. Generally, the classification model
built with the selected features is effective in friendship
1 prediction with both datasets.
2) Two-fold Cross-Validation
We used the two-fold cross-validation to verify the
reliability of the friendship prediction model. In the dataset
of Foursquare, we select 2,731 users who have update in
Paris and collect all of their updates as D1 and select 5,665
users who have update in London and collect their updates as
D2. We first train on D1 and test on D2, and then train on D2
and test on D1. In the dataset of Jiepang, we select 3,656
users who have update in Beijing and collect all of their
updates as D3 and select 5,275 users who have update in
Shanghai and collect their updates as D4. Similarly, we train
on D3 and test on D4, and vice versa.
As the friendship in the user social topology network is
relatively sparse, the number of the pair of non-friendship
was selected three times than the number of the pair of
friendship to reduce the effect of imbalance data to the result
of classification [33].

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 Paris delete 5% friendship Paris delete 10% friendship
1 1

0.5 Precision 0.5

Recall
F-measure
0 0
RandomForest SVM NaiveBay es RandomForest SVM NaiveBayes
(a) (b)
Shanghai delete 5% friendship Shanghai delete 10% friendship
1 1

0.5 0.5

0 0
RandomForest SVM NaiveBayes RandomForest SVM NaiveBayes
(c) (d)

Figure 3. Mining potential friendship

Paris train/London test London train/Paris test

1 1

0.5 Precision 0.5

Recall
F-measure
0 0
Random Forest SVM NaiveB ay es Random Forest SVM NaiveBayes
(a) (b)
Beijing train/Shanghai test Shanghai train/Beijing test
1 1

0.5 0.5

0 0
Random Forest SVM NaiveBayes RandomForest SVM NaiveBayes
(c) (d)

Figure 4. Cross-verify of checking data

The results of two-fold cross-validation are shown in
Fig.4. For the dataset of Foursquare, SVM performs the best.
The result of Naïve Bayes is also acceptable. In the dataset of
Jiepang, the experiment results show that all of the three
algorithms have high precision, recall and accuracy of
friendship prediction. As we can see from two sets of the
cross-validation results, although there is some difference
between the three classification algorithms, we have
achieved anticipated goal. The results indicate that our model
can be trained using the data in one city and used to test
other cities.
C. Comparison with Other Model
We compare the performance of our approach with
Multi-Layered Friendship Model [8].We use the same
features to build Multi-Layered Friendship Model [8] to
make friendship prediction on the dataset of Foursquare. As
we can see from Fig. 5, although we get good performance
on the accuracy of the model, the precision is less than 0.1
when the value of F is lower, when F is bigger, the recall is
almost close to zero and the precision is not greater than 0.4.
It means that the model is prone to predict users who are not
friends. It is obvious that identifying someone who will be
friends to users is more interesting than find someone who is
not. We can get the conclusion that our method performs
well than the Multi-Layered Friendship Model [8] on
friendship prediction.
D. Effect of Different Feature Combinations
We also analyze the contribution of the online and offline
features by using different combination of features to make
friendship prediction with our method. As we can see from

2228
Fig.6, it is obvious that our model performs well when using ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
online feature (social topology), which means that online This work was partially supported by the National Basic
features make greater contribution than offline features in Research Program of China (No.2012CB316400), the
our method. This also shows that the online behaviors of National Natural Science Foundation of China (No.
users reflect their preference better. This phenomenon could 61222209, 61103063, and 61373119), the Program for New
explain why the model performance better in Jiepang. In Century Excellent Talents in University (No. NCET-12-
China’s traditional culture, friend of a friend is a friend, 0466), the Specialized Research Fund for the Doctoral
while in western countries, there not. Program of Higher Education (No. 20126102110043), the
0.9 Natural Science Basic Research Plan in Shanxi Province of
China (No. 2012JQ8028) and the Basic Research Foundation
0.8
of NPU (No. JC20110267).
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