Discovering Family Groups in Passenger Social Networks

People usually travel together with others in groups for different purposes, such as family members for visiting relatives, colleagues for business, friends for sightseeing and so on. Especially, the family groups, as a kind of the most common consumer units, have a considerable scale in the field of passenger transportation market. Accurately identifying family groups can help the carriers to provide passengers with personalized travel services and precise product recommendation. This paper studies the problem of finding family groups in the field of civil aviation and proposes a family group detection method based on passenger social networks. First of all, we construct passenger social networks based on their co-travel behaviors extracted from the historical travel records; secondly, we use a collective classification algorithm to classify the social relationships between passengers into family or non-family relationship groups; finally, we employ a weighted community detection algorithm to find family groups, which takes the relationship classification results as the weights of edges. Experimental results on a real dataset of passenger travel records in the field of civil aviation demonstrate that our method can effectively find family groups from historical travel records.