1,386 research outputs found
Interests Diffusion in Social Networks
Understanding cultural phenomena on Social Networks (SNs) and exploiting the
implicit knowledge about their members is attracting the interest of different
research communities both from the academic and the business side. The
community of complexity science is devoting significant efforts to define laws,
models, and theories, which, based on acquired knowledge, are able to predict
future observations (e.g. success of a product). In the mean time, the semantic
web community aims at engineering a new generation of advanced services by
defining constructs, models and methods, adding a semantic layer to SNs. In
this context, a leapfrog is expected to come from a hybrid approach merging the
disciplines above. Along this line, this work focuses on the propagation of
individual interests in social networks. The proposed framework consists of the
following main components: a method to gather information about the members of
the social networks; methods to perform some semantic analysis of the Domain of
Interest; a procedure to infer members' interests; and an interests evolution
theory to predict how the interests propagate in the network. As a result, one
achieves an analytic tool to measure individual features, such as members'
susceptibilities and authorities. Although the approach applies to any type of
social network, here it is has been tested against the computer science
research community.
The DBLP (Digital Bibliography and Library Project) database has been elected
as test-case since it provides the most comprehensive list of scientific
production in this field.Comment: 30 pages 13 figs 4 table
Assessing Quality of Consumer Reviews in Mobile Application Markets: A Principal Component Analysis Approach
This study presents a simple, theory-based method for calculating a metric which reflects the quality of online consumer reviews in mobile application markets. Derived from prior online consumer review studies based on psychology, information quality, and economics literature, a metric for measuring online consumer review quality is developed. The metric is a weighted sum of three variables (Squared Star Rating, Log-transformed Word Count, and Sum of Squared Negative and Positive Sentiment), and weights for calculating the metric are estimated by using Principal Component Analysis (PCA) technique. Preliminary assessment of the proposed method shows that metrics computed by using the proposed method are positively correlated with helpfulness ranks of mobile application reviews in Google Play. However, PCA results show that one of the variables (i.e., sentiment) used for developing the metric did not load consistently on the first factor component. From the findings of the preliminary evaluation on the metric, limitations and future research directions of the proposed method are discussed
Soothing Your Heart and Feeling Connected: A New Experimental Paradigm to Study the Benefits of Self-Compassion
This is the final version. Available from SAGE Publications via the DOI in this record.Self-compassion and its cultivation in psychological interventions are associated with improved mental health and well-being. However, the underlying processes for this are not well understood. We randomly assigned 135 participants to study the effect of two short-term self-compassion exercises on self-reported-state mood and psychophysiological responses compared to three control conditions of negative (rumination), neutral, and positive (excitement) valence. Increased self-reported-state self-compassion, affiliative affect, and decreased self-criticism were found after both self-compassion exercises and the positive-excitement condition. However, a psychophysiological response pattern of reduced arousal (reduced heart rate and skin conductance) and increased parasympathetic activation (increased heart rate variability) were unique to the self-compassion conditions. This pattern is associated with effective emotion regulation in times of adversity. As predicted, rumination triggered the opposite pattern across self-report and physiological responses. Furthermore, we found partial evidence that physiological arousal reduction and parasympathetic activation precede the experience of feeling safe and connected.Compassionate Mind FoundationUniversity of Exete
Learning Hidden Influences in Large-Scale Dynamical Social Networks: A Data-Driven Sparsity-Based Approach, in Memory of Roberto Tempo
The processes of information diffusion across social networks (for example, the spread of opinions and the formation of beliefs) are attracting substantial interest in disciplines ranging from behavioral sciences to mathematics and engineering (see "Summary"). Since the opinions and behaviors of each individual are infl uenced by interactions with others, understanding the structure of interpersonal infl uences is a key ingredient to predict, analyze, and, possibly, control information and decisions [1]. With the rapid proliferation of social media platforms that provide instant messaging, blogging, and other networking services (see "Online Social Networks") people can easily share news, opinions, and preferences. Information can reach a broad audience much faster than before, and opinion mining and sentiment analysis are becoming key challenges in modern society [2]. The first anecdotal evidence of this fact is probably the use that the Obama campaign made of social networks during the 2008 U.S. presidential election [3]. More recently, several news outlets stated that Facebook users played a major role in spreading fake news that might have infl uenced the outcome of the 2016 U.S. presidential election [4]. This can be explained by the phenomena of homophily and biased assimilation [5]-[7] in social networks, which correspond to the tendency of people to follow the behaviors of their friends and establish relationships with like-minded individuals
A survey of statistical network models
Networks are ubiquitous in science and have become a focal point for
discussion in everyday life. Formal statistical models for the analysis of
network data have emerged as a major topic of interest in diverse areas of
study, and most of these involve a form of graphical representation.
Probability models on graphs date back to 1959. Along with empirical studies in
social psychology and sociology from the 1960s, these early works generated an
active network community and a substantial literature in the 1970s. This effort
moved into the statistical literature in the late 1970s and 1980s, and the past
decade has seen a burgeoning network literature in statistical physics and
computer science. The growth of the World Wide Web and the emergence of online
networking communities such as Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn, and a host of
more specialized professional network communities has intensified interest in
the study of networks and network data. Our goal in this review is to provide
the reader with an entry point to this burgeoning literature. We begin with an
overview of the historical development of statistical network modeling and then
we introduce a number of examples that have been studied in the network
literature. Our subsequent discussion focuses on a number of prominent static
and dynamic network models and their interconnections. We emphasize formal
model descriptions, and pay special attention to the interpretation of
parameters and their estimation. We end with a description of some open
problems and challenges for machine learning and statistics.Comment: 96 pages, 14 figures, 333 reference
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