Identifying User Relationship on WeChat Money-Gifting Network

Description

With the proliferation of online social networks, the identification or classification of real-life relationship between users has been very useful for many applications such as financial fraud detection. In real life, usually people with different relationships would present gifts with special meanings to each other on different dates. In many Asian cultures, especially in Chinese culture, the Money gifting is a traditional form of monetary gift.With the rapid development of the Internet, people gradually began to give electronic red packets instead of paper ones as the means of money gifting on social network platforms. As motivated, in this paper we advocate a novel approach that exploits users’ Money gift interactions for users relationship identification on We Chat, one of the largest social platforms in China.Specifically, we analyze the WeChat red packets network, identify the real-life relationship types between users through mining the semantic information of the amount and sending time of each red packet. In order to better capture the gifting behaviors between users for relationship identification on one hand, we construct an Amount-Date Graph and apply the graph embedding method to learn embeddings of the amount and sending date of each money gifting. On the other hand, we propose a novel sequential model, Cross & Attention Sequence Model (CASM), which explicitly learns the interactions between the latent semantic information of each red packet’s amount and sending date in the Money giftsequence between two users. To validate our approach, we conduct comprehensive experiments on a real-world WeChat Users Red Packets dataset that involves 8 kinds of real-life relationships. The experiments show that our proposed approach performs significantly better than baselines and achieves 81.70% prediction accuracy.