At least one embodiment of this disclosure includes a method of inferring attribute labels for a user in a social networking system based on the user's social connections and user-specified attribute labels in the social networking system. The method can include: establishing variational equations based on attribute labels of nodes in an ego network in a social graph of a social networking system; determining likelihood scores for at least a portion of the attribute labels of neighboring nodes from a focal user node in the ego network based on user-specified attribute labels from the social networking system; and calculating probability distributions of possible attribute labels for the focal user node of the ego network based on the variational equations and the likelihood scores.