2,097 research outputs found
Friendship networks and social status
In empirical studies of friendship networks participants are typically asked,
in interviews or questionnaires, to identify some or all of their close
friends, resulting in a directed network in which friendships can, and often
do, run in only one direction between a pair of individuals. Here we analyze a
large collection of such networks representing friendships among students at US
high and junior-high schools and show that the pattern of unreciprocated
friendships is far from random. In every network, without exception, we find
that there exists a ranking of participants, from low to high, such that almost
all unreciprocated friendships consist of a lower-ranked individual claiming
friendship with a higher-ranked one. We present a maximum-likelihood method for
deducing such rankings from observed network data and conjecture that the
rankings produced reflect a measure of social status. We note in particular
that reciprocated and unreciprocated friendships obey different statistics,
suggesting different formation processes, and that rankings are correlated with
other characteristics of the participants that are traditionally associated
with status, such as age and overall popularity as measured by total number of
friends.Comment: 7 pages, 6 figure
Detecting Cohesive and 2-mode Communities in Directed and Undirected Networks
Networks are a general language for representing relational information among
objects. An effective way to model, reason about, and summarize networks, is to
discover sets of nodes with common connectivity patterns. Such sets are
commonly referred to as network communities. Research on network community
detection has predominantly focused on identifying communities of densely
connected nodes in undirected networks.
In this paper we develop a novel overlapping community detection method that
scales to networks of millions of nodes and edges and advances research along
two dimensions: the connectivity structure of communities, and the use of edge
directedness for community detection. First, we extend traditional definitions
of network communities by building on the observation that nodes can be densely
interlinked in two different ways: In cohesive communities nodes link to each
other, while in 2-mode communities nodes link in a bipartite fashion, where
links predominate between the two partitions rather than inside them. Our
method successfully detects both 2-mode as well as cohesive communities, that
may also overlap or be hierarchically nested. Second, while most existing
community detection methods treat directed edges as though they were
undirected, our method accounts for edge directions and is able to identify
novel and meaningful community structures in both directed and undirected
networks, using data from social, biological, and ecological domains.Comment: Published in the proceedings of WSDM '1
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Community detection in network analysis: a survey
The existence of community structures in networks is not unusual, including in the domains of sociology, biology, and business, etc. The characteristic of the community structure is that nodes of the same community are highly similar while on the contrary, nodes across communities present low similarity.
In academia, there is a surge in research efforts on community detection in network analysis, especially in developing statistically sound methodologies for exploring, modeling, and interpreting these kind of structures and relationships.
This survey paper aims to provide a brief review of current applicable
statistical methodologies and approaches in a comparative manner along with metrics for evaluating graph clustering results and application using R. At the
end, we provide promising future research directions.Statistic
Multirelational Organization of Large-scale Social Networks in an Online World
The capacity to collect fingerprints of individuals in online media has
revolutionized the way researchers explore human society. Social systems can be
seen as a non-linear superposition of a multitude of complex social networks,
where nodes represent individuals and links capture a variety of different
social relations. Much emphasis has been put on the network topology of social
interactions, however, the multi-dimensional nature of these interactions has
largely been ignored in empirical studies, mostly because of lack of data.
Here, for the first time, we analyze a complete, multi-relational, large social
network of a society consisting of the 300,000 odd players of a massive
multiplayer online game. We extract networks of six different types of
one-to-one interactions between the players. Three of them carry a positive
connotation (friendship, communication, trade), three a negative (enmity, armed
aggression, punishment). We first analyze these types of networks as separate
entities and find that negative interactions differ from positive interactions
by their lower reciprocity, weaker clustering and fatter-tail degree
distribution. We then proceed to explore how the inter-dependence of different
network types determines the organization of the social system. In particular
we study correlations and overlap between different types of links and
demonstrate the tendency of individuals to play different roles in different
networks. As a demonstration of the power of the approach we present the first
empirical large-scale verification of the long-standing structural balance
theory, by focusing on the specific multiplex network of friendship and enmity
relations.Comment: 7 pages, 5 figures, accepted for publication in PNA
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