Measuring Friendship Closeness: A Perspective of Social Identity Theory
Shiqi Zhang, Jiachen Sun, Wenqing Lin, Xiaokui Xiao, Bo Tang

TL;DR
This paper introduces new friendship closeness measures based on social identity theory, considering group information to improve prediction accuracy in online gaming social networks.
Contribution
It develops SIT-based quantitative measures that incorporate local and global group information, outperforming existing methods in predicting friendship behaviors.
Findings
Outperforms state-of-the-art methods by up to 23.2% in behavior prediction.
Achieves up to 34.2% improvement in online target recommendation.
Validated on three online gaming datasets with extensive experiments.
Abstract
Measuring the closeness of friendships is an important problem that finds numerous applications in practice. For example, online gaming platforms often host friendship-enhancing events in which a user (called the source) only invites his/her friend (called the target) to play together. In this scenario, the measure of friendship closeness is the backbone for understanding source invitation and target adoption behaviors, and underpins the recommendation of promising targets for the sources. However, most existing measures for friendship closeness only consider the information between the source and target but ignore the information of groups where they are located, which renders inferior results. To address this issue, we present new measures for friendship closeness based on the social identity theory (SIT), which describes the inclination that a target endorses behaviors of users…
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