3D Visualization of Heterogeneous User Interactions in a Social Network

Abstract

With the popularity of social networks, users can communicate with each other in a more convenient way. However, the increasing amount of data poses new challenges for the analysis of the social activities of the users. In this article, we propose to visualize the heterogeneous information of user interactions in a social network in a three-dimensional way using the concept of solar systems. The target user represents the center of the solar system. We determine physical variables from interaction frequencies between the user and their friends to be visualized. This gives the user a better insight about their relationships on Facebook. To show the interactions between the user and their friends, we choose four variables related to the solar system: the size of each planet, its angular velocity, and the semi-major and the semi-minor axis of its elliptical orbit. Our system measures the interaction frequencies between a user and their friends based on a linear model. Its coefficients are derived from an online survey we performed. The experimental results indicate that the accuracy of our estimated interaction frequency is better than the accuracy for each individual interaction feature. The average accuracy improvement is 15.93%.