14,324 research outputs found
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
Applications of Structural Balance in Signed Social Networks
We present measures, models and link prediction algorithms based on the
structural balance in signed social networks. Certain social networks contain,
in addition to the usual 'friend' links, 'enemy' links. These networks are
called signed social networks. A classical and major concept for signed social
networks is that of structural balance, i.e., the tendency of triangles to be
'balanced' towards including an even number of negative edges, such as
friend-friend-friend and friend-enemy-enemy triangles. In this article, we
introduce several new signed network analysis methods that exploit structural
balance for measuring partial balance, for finding communities of people based
on balance, for drawing signed social networks, and for solving the problem of
link prediction. Notably, the introduced methods are based on the signed graph
Laplacian and on the concept of signed resistance distances. We evaluate our
methods on a collection of four signed social network datasets.Comment: 37 page
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