Finding email correspondents in social networks

Email correspondents play an important role in many people's social networks. Finding email correspondents in social networks accurately, though may seem to be straightforward at a first glance, is challenging. To the best of our knowledge, this problem has not been carefully and thoroughly addressed in research. Most of the existing online social networking sites recommend possible matches by comparing the information of email accounts and social network profiles. However, as shown empirically in this thesis, such methods may not be effective in practice. In this thesis, we systematically investigate the problem and develop a practical data mining approach. Our method not only utilizes the similarity between email accounts and social network user profiles, but also explores the similarity between the email communication network and the social network under investigation. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method using two real data sets on emails and Facebook.