Reliability Analysis with Diameter Constraint in Social Networks

Abstract

Social networks provide representations for each user and show behavioral patterns in different groups. Many researches have been done on the area. One of the descriptions on dependence between users and groups is very important and not able to be ignored, especially the cascade of dependence. In addition, we find that the propagation of dependence in users is consistent with reliability issue. In this paper, we propose a reliability model of a social network and quantify the relationship between users and groups. To explore a user’s neighbors, we find that the reliability with diameter constraint is proper to describe the neighbor relationship and the reliability between a user v and a selected group K , which can be expanded by ( v, K )-trees and the proposed definition of ( v, K )-opposite trees. Moreover, we apply reliability to friend recommendation with physical-proximity module. The reliability-based method reveals that intermediate users are reliable in the propagation of reliability. Using synthetic data sets, we validate the results of reliability analysis.