From face-to-face gathering to social structure

The rapid development of on-line social networking sites has dramatically changed the way people live and communicate. One particularly interesting phenomena came along with this development is the prominent role of various on-line networking portals played in scheduling and organizing off-line group events and activities. In this paper, we focus on studying the face-to-face(f2f) group formed through, or facilitated by, on-line portals. We first show the distinct characteristics of such f2f groups by analyzing datasets collected from Whrrl and Meetup. Next, we propose a dynamic model for group gathering based on the process of friend invitation to interpret how a f2f group is formed on-line. The results of our model are confirmed by empirical observations. Finally, we demonstrate that using such group information can effectively improve the accuracies of social tie inference and friend recommendation.