STRUCTURAL SIMILARITY MEASURE OF USERS PROFILES BASED ON A WEIGHTED BIPARTITE GRAPHS

Abstract. The user profile is a very important tool in several fields such as recommendation systems, customization systems etc., it is used to narrow the number of data or results provided for a specific user, also to minimize the cost and the time of processing of multiple systems. Whatever the user profile model used, it’s updating and enrichment is a very essential step in the information research process in order to obtain more interesting and satisfactory results, which lead the information systems to develop several techniques aiming to enrich them based especially on similarity methods between user profiles. The similarity methods are used for several tasks such as the detection of duplicate profiles in online social network, also to answer the problem of cold start, and to predict users who can become friends as well as their future intentions, etc. In this paper, we propose a new approach to express the similarity between users profiles by developing a structural similarity measure to calculate the similarity between user profiles based on SimRank measure or similarity ,and the properties of bipartite graphs, in order to take advantage of the information provided by the relational structure between user profiles and their interests, our method is characterized by the similarity propagation between graph's nodes over iterations from source nodes to their successors, so our method finds profiles similar to the query profile, whether the links are direct or indirect between profiles.