Who were you talking to - Mining interpersonal relationships from cellphone network data

People play different roles in various social networks. Even in a single network, people may interact with others based on different roles, and there are various relationships among them. However, current research usually treats all relationships homogeneously (i.e. friendship). In this paper, we try to identify different types of relationship (family, colleague, and social) within social networks. By analyzing a large-scale cellphone network, we gain insights about human mobility patterns. We design three metrics to capture colocation behaviors for cellphone users, taking spatial-temporal factors into consideration. These metrics show that users with different relationships demonstrate significantly different co-locating patterns. With these metrics as features, we adopt supervised approach to classify cellphone user pairs into different relationship categories. Comparing to using network and communication features, co-location metrics demonstrate better performance to fulfill the task of relationship identification.

I. Introduction

People are often engaged in multiple social networks with different roles. Even in a single network, a user may be under different roles when interacting with others. Relationships between users are indeed heterogeneous. On the other hand, most current research treat all links in social networks homogeneously, i.e. friendship, since it is difficult to get link labels. However, the interaction patterns between users may be quite different based on relationships [1] [2] [3]. In addition, social networks are constrained by spatial-temporal factors, and a user's behavior will comply with spatial and temporal restrictions [4] [5]. These findings indicated possibilities for identifying relationship types by observing users' spatial-temporal interactions in social networks.