Actor Identification In Implicit Relational Data Sources

Large scale network data sets have become increasingly accessible to researchers. While computer networks, networks of webpages and biological networks are all important sources of data, it is the study of social networks that is driving many new research questions. Researchers are finding that the popularity of online social networking sites may produce large dynamic data sets of actor connectivity. Sites such as Facebook have 250 million active users and Linked In 43 million active users. Such systems offer researchers potential access to rich large scale networks for study. However, while data sets can be collected directly from sources that specifically define the actors and ties between those actors, there are many other data sources that do not have an explicit network structure defined. To transform such non-relational data into a relational format two facets must be identified - the actors and the ties between the actors. In this chapter we survey a range of techniques that can be employed to identify unique actors when inferring networks from non explicit network data sets. We present our methods for unique node identification of social network actors in a business scenario where a unique node identifier is not available. We validate these methods through the study of a large scale real world case study of over 9 million records.