A New Model for Rating Users’ Profiles in Online Social Networks

Profiling users in Online Social Networks (OSNs) is of great benefit in multiple domains (e.g., marketing, sociology, and forensics). In this paper, we propose a new model for rating user’s profile (i.e., low, medium, high, and advanced) in an OSN community by embedding it into clusters located at predefined range of radius in a low-dimensional Cartesian space. The orthogonal coordinates of the profile are estimated using Principle Component Analysis (PCA) applied on a vector of metrics formulated as a set of attributes of interest (i.e., qualitative and quantitative) mined from the user’s profile to characterize his/her level of participation and behavior in the community. The experimentations are conducted on 3000 simulated profiles of three OSNs (Facebook, Twitter and Instagram) by embedding them in three cartesian spaces of three corresponding communities (Religion, Political and Lifestyle).  The results show that we are able to estimate accurately the profile rates by reducing the vector of metrics to a low-dimensional space whittle down to 3-D space.