11 research outputs found
Emergence of scale-free leadership structure in social recommender systems
The study of the organization of social networks is important for
understanding of opinion formation, rumor spreading, and the emergence of
trends and fashion. This paper reports empirical analysis of networks extracted
from four leading sites with social functionality (Delicious, Flickr, Twitter
and YouTube) and shows that they all display a scale-free leadership structure.
To reproduce this feature, we propose an adaptive network model driven by
social recommending. Artificial agent-based simulations of this model highlight
a "good get richer" mechanism where users with broad interests and good
judgments are likely to become popular leaders for the others. Simulations also
indicate that the studied social recommendation mechanism can gradually improve
the user experience by adapting to tastes of its users. Finally we outline
implications for real online resource-sharing systems
True scale-free networks hidden by finite size effects
We analyze about two hundred naturally occurring networks with distinct
dynamical origins to formally test whether the commonly assumed hypothesis of
an underlying scale-free structure is generally viable. This has recently been
questioned on the basis of statistical testing of the validity of power law
distributions of network degrees by contrasting real data. Specifically, we
analyze by finite-size scaling analysis the datasets of real networks to check
whether purported departures from the power law behavior are due to the
finiteness of the sample size. In this case, power laws would be recovered in
the case of progressively larger cutoffs induced by the size of the sample. We
find that a large number of the networks studied follow a finite size scaling
hypothesis without any self-tuning. This is the case of biological protein
interaction networks, technological computer and hyperlink networks, and
informational networks in general. Marked deviations appear in other cases,
especially infrastructure and transportation but also social networks. We
conclude that underlying scale invariance properties of many naturally
occurring networks are extant features often clouded by finite-size effects due
to the nature of the sample data
Similarity from multi-dimensional scaling: solving the accuracy and diversity dilemma in information filtering
Recommender systems are designed to assist individual users to navigate through the rapidly growing amount of information. One of the most successful recommendation techniques is the collaborative filtering, which has been extensively investigated and has already found wide applications in e-commerce. One of challenges in this algorithm is how to accurately quantify the similarities of user pairs and item pairs. In this paper, we employ the multidimensional scaling (MDS) method to measure the similarities between nodes in user-item bipartite networks. The MDS method can extract the essential similarity information from the networks by smoothing out noise, which provides a graphical display of the structure of the networks. With the similarity measured from MDS, we find that the item-based collaborative filtering algorithm can outperform the diffusion-based recommendation algorithms. Moreover, we show that this method tends to recommend unpopular items and increase the global diversification of the networks in long term
Prediction in complex systems: the case of the international trade network
Predicting the future evolution of complex systems is one of the main challenges in complexity science. Based on a current snapshot of a network, link prediction algorithms aim to predict its future evolution. We apply here link prediction algorithms to data on the international trade between countries. This data can be represented as a complex network where links connect countries with the products that they export. Link prediction techniques based on heat and mass diffusion processes are employed to obtain predictions for products exported in the future. These baseline predictions are improved using a recent metric of country fitness and product similarity. The overall best results are achieved with a newly developed metric of product similarity which takes advantage of causality in the network evolution
Emergence of scale-free close-knit friendship structure in online social networks
Despite the structural properties of online social networks have attracted
much attention, the properties of the close-knit friendship structures remain
an important question. Here, we mainly focus on how these mesoscale structures
are affected by the local and global structural properties. Analyzing the data
of four large-scale online social networks reveals several common structural
properties. It is found that not only the local structures given by the
indegree, outdegree, and reciprocal degree distributions follow a similar
scaling behavior, the mesoscale structures represented by the distributions of
close-knit friendship structures also exhibit a similar scaling law. The degree
correlation is very weak over a wide range of the degrees. We propose a simple
directed network model that captures the observed properties. The model
incorporates two mechanisms: reciprocation and preferential attachment. Through
rate equation analysis of our model, the local-scale and mesoscale structural
properties are derived. In the local-scale, the same scaling behavior of
indegree and outdegree distributions stems from indegree and outdegree of nodes
both growing as the same function of the introduction time, and the reciprocal
degree distribution also shows the same power-law due to the linear
relationship between the reciprocal degree and in/outdegree of nodes. In the
mesoscale, the distributions of four closed triples representing close-knit
friendship structures are found to exhibit identical power-laws, a behavior
attributed to the negligible degree correlations. Intriguingly, all the
power-law exponents of the distributions in the local-scale and mesoscale
depend only on one global parameter -- the mean in/outdegree, while both the
mean in/outdegree and the reciprocity together determine the ratio of the
reciprocal degree of a node to its in/outdegree.Comment: 48 pages, 34 figure