ActiveIter: Meta Diagram Based Active Learning in Social Networks Alignment

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 instances, 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 (Active Iterative Alignment), is introduced in this paper. The model 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 were performed on a real-world aligned networks dataset, and the experimental results have demonstrated the effectiveness of ActiveIter compared with other state-of-the-art baseline methods.