Organizational overlap on social networks and its applications

Online social networks have become important for networking, communication, sharing, and discovery. A considerable challenge these networks face is the fact that an online social network is partially observed because two individuals might know each other, but may not have established a connection on the site. Therefore, link prediction and recommendations are important tasks for any online social network. In this paper, we address the problem of computing edge affinity between two users on a social network, based on the users belonging to organizations such as companies, schools, and online groups. We present experimental insights from social network data on organizational overlap, a novel mathematical model to compute the probability of connection between two people based on organizational overlap, and experimental validation of this model based on real social network data. We also present novel ways in which the organization overlap model can be applied to link prediction and community detection, which in itself could be useful for recommending entities to follow and generating personalized news feed.