Twitter

These algorithms have been reported to be used at some point (at least, in experiments) for the Twitter Who-to-follow service.

• Closure

• Cosine similarity

• Love

• Money

Closure

Algorithm that recommends reciprocal edges according to the number of common neighbors between the already existing edge endpoints.

• PageRank

• Personalized PageRank

Reference: P. Gupta, A. Goel, J. Lin, A. Sharma, D. Wang, R. Zadeh. WTF: The Who to Follow Service at Twitter. 22nd Annual International Conference on World Wide Web (WWW 2013), 505-514 (2013).

Configuration file

The non-personalized PageRank version is selected as:

Closure:

Cosine similarity

This considers several variants of the cosine similarity in the experiments: we consider three:

• Average cosine similarity: it takes the average similarity of the candidate user with the authorities the target user is currently following.

• Centroid cosine similarity: for each user, a centroid is built, using the vectors of the followed users. The score is the cosine of two vectors.

• Maximum cosine similarity: it takes the maximum similarity between the authorities that the target user is currently following.

Parameters

• r: the PageRank teleport rate, for computing the circles of trust.

• circlesize: the size of the circles of trust. If negative or zero, we take the maximum possible size.

Configuration file

The Yaml code for the average cosine algorithm is:

Average cosine:
  r:
    type: double
    range:
    - start: 0.1
      end: 0.99
      step: 0.1
  circlesize:
    type: int
    values: [0,10,100,1000]

for the centroid cosine similarity variant, it is:

Centroid cosine:
  r:
    type: double
    range:
    - start: 0.1
      end: 0.99
      step: 0.1
  circlesize:
    type: int
    values: [0,10,100,1000]

and, for the maximum cosine similarity:

Maximum cosine:
  r:
    type: double
    range:
    - start: 0.1
      end: 0.99
      step: 0.1
  circlesize:
    type: int
    values: [0,10,100,1000]

Love

Variant of the personalized HITS algorithm, computed over a circle of trust.

Reference: A. Goel. The Who-To-Follow System at Twitter: Algorithms, Impact and Further Research. 32rd Annual International Conference on World Wide Web (2014), industry track (2014).

Parameters

• mode: true if we want to use the authorities scores, false if we want to use the hubs scores.

• alpha: teleport rate for the personalized HITS algorithm.

• r: the PageRank teleport rate, for computing the circles of trust.

Configuration file

Love:
  mode:
    type: boolean
    values: [true,false]
  r:
    type: double
    range:
    - start: 0.1
      end: 0.99
      step: 0.1
  alpha:
    type: double
    range:
    - start: 0.1
      end: 0.99
      step: 0.1

Money

Variant of the personalized SALSA algorithm, computed over a circle of trust.

Reference: A. Goel, P. Gupta, J. Sirois, D. Wang, A. Sharma, S. Gurumurthy. The who-to-follow system at Twitter: Strategy, algorithms and revenue impact. Interfaces 45(1), 98-107 (2015).

Parameters

• mode: true if we want to use the authorities scores, false if we want to use the hubs scores.

• alpha: teleport rate for the personalized HITS algorithm.

• r: the PageRank teleport rate, for computing the circles of trust.

Configuration file

Money:
  mode:
    type: boolean
    values: [true,false]
  r:
    type: double
    range:
    - start: 0.1
      end: 0.99
      step: 0.1
  alpha:
    type: double
    range:
    - start: 0.1
      end: 0.99
      step: 0.1