Egocentric analysis

An ego network is one perspective on social network analysis, it looks at the individual and their circle of friends and the connections that fan out from that person. Writing in the International Journal of Ad Hoc and Ubiquitous Computing, Tinghuai Ma of Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology, Nanjing, China, and colleagues describe a way to look at an ego network and to automatically and accurately glean information about the community surrounding the person at its centre. Obviously, by applying such an analysis to different individuals it should be possible to build up a picture of the wider community. The approach developed by the team could be useful users themselves, allowing them to take control of their contacts in an automated manner.

The team can build up circles of friends from their analysis. In a three-step process that looks for the similarities between user attributes, features of network structure, and the contact frequency between the central user, the ego, and their friends. “We compare the similarity among attributes of users first, the team reports, they can then “divide all friends by the similarity of properties between any friend and the central user.”

Xing, F., Ma, T., Tang, M. and Guan, D. (2019) ‘Friend circle identification in ego network based on hybrid method’, Int. J. Ad Hoc and Ubiquitous Computing, Vol. 30, No. 4, pp.224–234.