64,302 research outputs found
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
Node Embedding over Temporal Graphs
In this work, we present a method for node embedding in temporal graphs. We
propose an algorithm that learns the evolution of a temporal graph's nodes and
edges over time and incorporates this dynamics in a temporal node embedding
framework for different graph prediction tasks. We present a joint loss
function that creates a temporal embedding of a node by learning to combine its
historical temporal embeddings, such that it optimizes per given task (e.g.,
link prediction). The algorithm is initialized using static node embeddings,
which are then aligned over the representations of a node at different time
points, and eventually adapted for the given task in a joint optimization. We
evaluate the effectiveness of our approach over a variety of temporal graphs
for the two fundamental tasks of temporal link prediction and multi-label node
classification, comparing to competitive baselines and algorithmic
alternatives. Our algorithm shows performance improvements across many of the
datasets and baselines and is found particularly effective for graphs that are
less cohesive, with a lower clustering coefficient
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
Predicting epidemic risk from past temporal contact data
Understanding how epidemics spread in a system is a crucial step to prevent
and control outbreaks, with broad implications on the system's functioning,
health, and associated costs. This can be achieved by identifying the elements
at higher risk of infection and implementing targeted surveillance and control
measures. One important ingredient to consider is the pattern of
disease-transmission contacts among the elements, however lack of data or
delays in providing updated records may hinder its use, especially for
time-varying patterns. Here we explore to what extent it is possible to use
past temporal data of a system's pattern of contacts to predict the risk of
infection of its elements during an emerging outbreak, in absence of updated
data. We focus on two real-world temporal systems; a livestock displacements
trade network among animal holdings, and a network of sexual encounters in
high-end prostitution. We define the node's loyalty as a local measure of its
tendency to maintain contacts with the same elements over time, and uncover
important non-trivial correlations with the node's epidemic risk. We show that
a risk assessment analysis incorporating this knowledge and based on past
structural and temporal pattern properties provides accurate predictions for
both systems. Its generalizability is tested by introducing a theoretical model
for generating synthetic temporal networks. High accuracy of our predictions is
recovered across different settings, while the amount of possible predictions
is system-specific. The proposed method can provide crucial information for the
setup of targeted intervention strategies.Comment: 24 pages, 5 figures + SI (18 pages, 15 figures
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