| Abstrakt: |
The search for similar people is one of the most desirable aspects by users in a community, e.g., in a social network. The identification of similar people promotes the exchange of information about not only common topics, but can also lead to their participation in projects with shared interests. In marketing, it may also be useful to identify, e.g., potential customers that are similar to the customers who buy the most. It can also be used to recommend potential friends to a new user (the so-called cold start problem). In this chapter, we propose a novel algorithm for computing the similarity of users in a social network considering their characteristics, e.g., musical and literary tastes, gender, race, among others. However, that our proposal is generic in the sense that the social network analyst is free to choose the set of characteristics that will be used to establish the similarity among the users. In addition, we also propose an extension of our algorithm to the identification of similar couples, i.e., we face the cold start problem for couples. This could be useful, e.g., when a marriage is looking for similar couples in order to develop joint activities: trips, financial projects, and social meetings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
