Modeling the temporal dynamics of social rating networks using bidirectional effects of social relations and rating patterns

A social rating network (SRN) is a social network in which edges represent social relationships and users (nodes) express ratings on some of the given items. Such networks play an increasingly important role in reviewing websites such as Epinions.com or online sharing websites like Flickr.com. In this paper, we first observe and analyze the temporal behavior of users in a social rating network, who express ratings and create social relations. Then, we model the temporal dynamics of an SRN based on our observations, using the bidirectional effects of ratings and social relations. While existing models for other types of social networks have captured some of the effects, our model is the first one to
represent all four effects, i.e. social relations-on-ratings (social influence), social relations-on-social relations (transitivity), ratingson-social relations (selection), and ratings-on-ratings (correlational influence). Existing works consider these effects as static and constant throughout the evolution of an SRN, however our observations reveal that these effects are actually dynamic. We propose a robabilistic generative model for SRNs, which models the strength and dynamics of each effect throughout the network evolution. This model can serve for the prediction of future links, ratings or community structures. Due to the sensitive nature of SRNs, another motivation for our work is the generation of synthetic SRN data sets for research purposes. Our experimental studies on two real life datasets (Epinions and Flickr) demonstrate that the proposed model produces social rating networks that agree with real world data on a comprehensive set of evaluation criteria.