mCAF: a multi-dimensional clustering algorithm for friends of social network services

In recent years, social network services have grown rapidly. The number of friends of each user using social network services has also increased significantly and is so large that clustering and managing these friends has become difficult. In this paper, we propose an algorithm called mCAF that automatically clusters friends. Additionally, we propose methods that define the distance between different friends based on different sets of measurements. Our proposed mCAF algorithm attempts to reduce the effort and time required for users to manage their friends in social network services. The proposed algorithm could be more flexible and convenient by implementing different privacy settings for different groups of friends. According to our experimental results, we find that the improved ratios between mCAF and SCAN are 35.8 % in similarity and 84.9 % in F₁ score.