Finding a Needle in the Haystack - Recommending Online Communities on Social Media Platforms Using Network and Design Science

Abstract

We address the problem of recommending online communities on social media platforms using design science. Our method is grounded in network science and leverages the random surfer model of the web, small world networks, strength of weak connections and connectivity to analyze three types of large-scale networks. In doing so, we design features for structural hole assortativity and Local Clustering Coefficient rank to capture both the diversity and evolution of user interests. We also extract general online community features such as sizes and overlaps. Experiments conducted on a large dataset of 34,000 lists created and subscribed by 1600 active Twitter users over a six-month period show that our network features outperform the general and content features in terms of recommending communities at the top position. In addition, a combination of general and network features generated the best results in the top position with a significant performance improvement over using only the content features. A combination of all the three types of features gives best results in the top 5 and 10 positions while improving the quality of recommendations at every other position. Finally, our work also outperforms the latest work on community recommendation in social media platforms and has major implications for the design of online community recommenders.

Keywords: Social Media Platforms, Online Communities, Recommender Systems, Explainable AI, Network Science and Design Science