Skip to Content
Data Algorithms
book

Data Algorithms

by Mahmoud Parsian
July 2015
Intermediate to advanced
778 pages
17h 9m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Data Algorithms

Chapter 8. Common Friends

Given a social network with tens of millions of users, in this chapter we’ll implement a MapReduce program to identify “common friends” among all pairs of users. Let U be a set of all users: {U1, U2, ..., Un}. Our goal is to find common friends for every pair of (Ui, Uj) where i ≠ j.

For finding common friends, I provide three solutions:

  • MapReduce/Hadoop using primitive data types

  • MapReduce/Hadoop using custom data types

  • Spark using RDDs

These days most social network sites (such as Facebook, hi5, and LinkedIn) offer services to help you share messages, pictures, and videos among friends. Some sites even offer video chat services to help you connect with friends. By definition, a friend is a person whom one knows, likes, and trusts. For example, Facebook has your list of friends, and friend relationships are bidirectional on the site; if I’m your friend, you’re mine too. Typically social networks precompute calculations when they can to reduce the processing time of requests, and one common processing request involves the “You and Mary (your friend) have 185 friends in common” feature. When you visit someone’s profile, you see a list of friends that you have in common. This list doesn’t change frequently, so it is wasteful for the site to recalculate it every time you visit that person’s profile.

There are many ways to find the common friends between users of a social network. Here are two possible solutions:

  • Use a caching strategy and save ...

Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.

Read now

Unlock full access

More than 5,000 organizations count on O’Reilly

AirBnbBlueOriginElectronic ArtsHomeDepotNasdaqRakutenTata Consultancy Services

QuotationMarkO’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.
Julian F.
Head of Cybersecurity
QuotationMarkI wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.
Addison B.
Field Engineer
QuotationMarkI’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.
Amir M.
Data Platform Tech Lead
QuotationMarkI'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Mark W.
Embedded Software Engineer

You might also like

Data Algorithms with Spark

Data Algorithms with Spark

Mahmoud Parsian
Grokking Algorithms

Grokking Algorithms

Aditya Bhargava
Graph Algorithms

Graph Algorithms

Mark Needham, Amy E. Hodler

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9781491906170Errata Page