  Studies have shown that each person is more inclined to enjoy a group
activity when 1) she is interested in the activity, and 2) many friends with
the same interest join it as well. Nevertheless, even with the interest and
social tightness information available in online social networks, nowadays many
social group activities still need to be coordinated manually. In this paper,
therefore, we first formulate a new problem, named Participant Selection for
Group Activity (PSGA), to decide the group size and select proper participants
so that the sum of personal interests and social tightness of the participants
in the group is maximized, while the activity cost is also carefully examined.
To solve the problem, we design a new randomized algorithm, named Budget-Aware
Randomized Group Selection (BARGS), to optimally allocate the computation
budgets for effective selection of the group size and participants, and we
prove that BARGS can acquire the solution with a guaranteed performance bound.
The proposed algorithm was implemented in Facebook, and experimental results
demonstrate that social groups generated by the proposed algorithm
significantly outperform the baseline solutions.
