TranGAN: Generative Adversarial Network Based Transfer Learning for Social Tie Prediction

Social tie prediction is an important issue in social network analysis. Transfer learning is often used for social tie prediction to address the problem of insufficient labeled training data, since few users manually annotate their social relationships. In this paper, we propose TranGAN, a novel generative adversarial network (GAN) based transfer learning framework for social tie prediction, which leverages social theories as the common knowledge to bridge the source network and the target network. GAN helps augment the original data set by generating data samples that have a similar probability distribution to that of the original data, and the training of TranGAN converges faster compared to existing transfer learning models. We evaluate the performance of TranGAN with extensive experiments, and show that TranGAN outperforms traditional learning algorithms and existing transfer learning algorithm on several metrics, and is efficient for large-scale social networks.