18,356 research outputs found
Evolution of Ego-networks in Social Media with Link Recommendations
Ego-networks are fundamental structures in social graphs, yet the process of
their evolution is still widely unexplored. In an online context, a key
question is how link recommender systems may skew the growth of these networks,
possibly restraining diversity. To shed light on this matter, we analyze the
complete temporal evolution of 170M ego-networks extracted from Flickr and
Tumblr, comparing links that are created spontaneously with those that have
been algorithmically recommended. We find that the evolution of ego-networks is
bursty, community-driven, and characterized by subsequent phases of explosive
diameter increase, slight shrinking, and stabilization. Recommendations favor
popular and well-connected nodes, limiting the diameter expansion. With a
matching experiment aimed at detecting causal relationships from observational
data, we find that the bias introduced by the recommendations fosters global
diversity in the process of neighbor selection. Last, with two link prediction
experiments, we show how insights from our analysis can be used to improve the
effectiveness of social recommender systems.Comment: Proceedings of the 10th ACM International Conference on Web Search
and Data Mining (WSDM 2017), Cambridge, UK. 10 pages, 16 figures, 1 tabl
Personalized Degrees: Effects on Link Formation in Dynamic Networks from an Egocentric Perspective
Understanding mechanisms driving link formation in dynamic social networks is
a long-standing problem that has implications to understanding social structure
as well as link prediction and recommendation. Social networks exhibit a high
degree of transitivity, which explains the successes of common neighbor-based
methods for link prediction. In this paper, we examine mechanisms behind link
formation from the perspective of an ego node. We introduce the notion of
personalized degree for each neighbor node of the ego, which is the number of
other neighbors a particular neighbor is connected to. From empirical analyses
on four on-line social network datasets, we find that neighbors with higher
personalized degree are more likely to lead to new link formations when they
serve as common neighbors with other nodes, both in undirected and directed
settings. This is complementary to the finding of Adamic and Adar that neighbor
nodes with higher (global) degree are less likely to lead to new link
formations. Furthermore, on directed networks, we find that personalized
out-degree has a stronger effect on link formation than personalized in-degree,
whereas global in-degree has a stronger effect than global out-degree. We
validate our empirical findings through several link recommendation experiments
and observe that incorporating both personalized and global degree into link
recommendation greatly improves accuracy.Comment: To appear at the 10th International Workshop on Modeling Social Media
co-located with the Web Conference 201
Reading the Source Code of Social Ties
Though online social network research has exploded during the past years, not
much thought has been given to the exploration of the nature of social links.
Online interactions have been interpreted as indicative of one social process
or another (e.g., status exchange or trust), often with little systematic
justification regarding the relation between observed data and theoretical
concept. Our research aims to breach this gap in computational social science
by proposing an unsupervised, parameter-free method to discover, with high
accuracy, the fundamental domains of interaction occurring in social networks.
By applying this method on two online datasets different by scope and type of
interaction (aNobii and Flickr) we observe the spontaneous emergence of three
domains of interaction representing the exchange of status, knowledge and
social support. By finding significant relations between the domains of
interaction and classic social network analysis issues (e.g., tie strength,
dyadic interaction over time) we show how the network of interactions induced
by the extracted domains can be used as a starting point for more nuanced
analysis of online social data that may one day incorporate the normative
grammar of social interaction. Our methods finds applications in online social
media services ranging from recommendation to visual link summarization.Comment: 10 pages, 8 figures, Proceedings of the 2014 ACM conference on Web
(WebSci'14
Elite Tweets: Analysing the Twitter Communication Patterns of Labour Party Peers in the House of Lords
The micro-blogging platform Twitter has gained notoriety for its status as both a communication channel between private individuals, and as a public forum monitored by journalists, the public, and the state. Its potential application for political communication has not gone unnoticed; politicians have used Twitter to attract voters, interact with constituencies and advance issue-based campaigns. This article reports on the preliminary results of the research teamâs work with 21 peers sitting on the Labour frontbench. It is based on the monitoring and archival of the peersâ activity on Twitter for a period of 100 days from 16th May to 28th September 2012. Using a sample of more than 4,363 tweets and a mixed methodology combining semantic analysis, social network analysis and quantitative analysis, this paper explores the peersâ patterns of usage and communication on Twitter. Key findings are that as a tweeting community their behavior is consistent with others, however there is evidence that a coherent strategy is lacking. Labour peers tend to work in ego networks of self-interest as opposed to working together to promote party polic
Psychology and Sustainability, Homo Technicusand Slow Tech
Psychology and Sustainability, Homo Technicus and Slow TechIn previous issues of Visions for Sustainabilitywe have often published papers that consider the relationship between psychology and sustainability. On the one hand, researchers have examined various aspects of the incompatibility between how human societies and individuals behave in order to satisfy their needs and their desires and the natural processes that are essential for maintaining ecological balance and integrity, both for the people themselves and the environments they inhabit. Problems of sustainability are clearly related to human behaviours and therefore are a part of the psychological sphere. Studies have often focused on examining ways of promoting pro-environmental and reducing anti-environmental behaviours
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