Learning to Correlate Accounts Across Online Social Networks: An Embedding-Based Approach

Fan Zhou (), Kunpeng Zhang (), Shuying Xie () and Xucheng Luo ()
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Fan Zhou: School of Information and Software Engineering, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, 610054 Chengdu, China
Kunpeng Zhang: Decision, Operations & Information Technologies, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland 20742
Shuying Xie: JD.com, Inc., 101111 Beijing, China
Xucheng Luo: School of Information and Software Engineering, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, 610054 Chengdu, China

INFORMS Journal on Computing, 2020, vol. 32, issue 3, 714-729

Abstract: Cross-site account correlation correlates users who have multiple accounts but the same identity across online social networks (OSNs). Being able to identify cross-site users is important for a variety of applications in social networks, security, and electronic commerce, such as social link prediction and cross-domain recommendation. Because of either heterogeneous characteristics of platforms or some unobserved but intrinsic individual factors, the same individuals are likely to behave differently across OSNs, which accordingly causes many challenges for correlating accounts. Traditionally, account correlation is measured by analyzing user-generated content, such as writing style, rules of naming user accounts, or some existing metadata (e.g., account profile, account historical activities). Accounts can be correlated by de-anonymizing user behaviors, which is sometimes infeasible since such data are not often available. In this work, we propose a method, called ACCount eMbedding (ACCM), to go beyond text data and leverage semantics of network structures, a possibility that has not been well explored so far. ACCM aims to correlate accounts with high accuracy by exploiting the semantic information among accounts through random walks. It models and understands latent representations of accounts using an embedding framework similar to sequences of words in natural language models. It also learns a transformation matrix to project node representations into a common dimensional space for comparison. With evaluations on both real-world and synthetic data sets, we empirically demonstrate that ACCM provides performance improvement compared with several state-of-the-art baselines in correlating user accounts between OSNs.

Keywords: account correlation; network embedding; representation learning; alignment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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