Multiple Anonymized Social Networks Alignment

Users nowadays are normally involved in multiple (usually more than two) online social networks simultaneously to enjoy more social network services. Some of the networks that users are involved in can share common structures either due to the analogous network construction purposes or because of the similar social network features. However, the social network datasets available in research are usually pre-anonymized and accounts of the shared users in different networks are mostly isolated without any known connections. In this paper, we want to identify such connections between the shared users' accounts in multiple social networks (i.e., the anchor links), which is formally defined as the M-NASA (Multiple Anonymized Social Networks Alignment) problem. M-NASA is very challenging to address due to (1) the lack of known anchor links to build models, (2) the studied networks are anonymized, where no users' personal profile or attribute information is available, and (3) the "transitivity law" and the "one-to-one property" based constraints on anchor links. To resolve these challenges, a novel two-phase network alignment framework UMA (Unsupervised Multi-network Alignment) is proposed in this paper. Extensive experiments conducted on multiple real-world partially aligned social networks demonstrate that UMA can perform very well in solving the M-NASA problem.