NewFriends: an algorithm for computing the minimum number of friends required by a user to get the highest PageRank in a social network

Abstract

The online social networking phenomenon is growing rapidly all around the world. As a consequence, in recent years, several studies have been devoted to the analysis of social network sites. A specific issue that has been addressed is the identification of leaders of the social network based on well-known algorithms such as PageRank. In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm based on the PageRank method to determine the minimum number of new friends required by a user of a social network to become the user with the highest PageRank in the network. We provide formal mathematical definitions and validate our proposal with some experiments based on artificial and real data.

Keywords:

• social networks
• leadership
• friends
• PageRank method

Keywords:

• 91D30
• 40C05
• 65F30
• 05C50
• 05C20