4,324 research outputs found
A Model of Consistent Node Types in Signed Directed Social Networks
Signed directed social networks, in which the relationships between users can
be either positive (indicating relations such as trust) or negative (indicating
relations such as distrust), are increasingly common. Thus the interplay
between positive and negative relationships in such networks has become an
important research topic. Most recent investigations focus upon edge sign
inference using structural balance theory or social status theory. Neither of
these two theories, however, can explain an observed edge sign well when the
two nodes connected by this edge do not share a common neighbor (e.g., common
friend). In this paper we develop a novel approach to handle this situation by
applying a new model for node types. Initially, we analyze the local node
structure in a fully observed signed directed network, inferring underlying
node types. The sign of an edge between two nodes must be consistent with their
types; this explains edge signs well even when there are no common neighbors.
We show, moreover, that our approach can be extended to incorporate directed
triads, when they exist, just as in models based upon structural balance or
social status theory. We compute Bayesian node types within empirical studies
based upon partially observed Wikipedia, Slashdot, and Epinions networks in
which the largest network (Epinions) has 119K nodes and 841K edges. Our
approach yields better performance than state-of-the-art approaches for these
three signed directed networks.Comment: To appear in the IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in
Social Network Analysis and Mining (ASONAM), 201
Randomized Algorithms for the Loop Cutset Problem
We show how to find a minimum weight loop cutset in a Bayesian network with
high probability. Finding such a loop cutset is the first step in the method of
conditioning for inference. Our randomized algorithm for finding a loop cutset
outputs a minimum loop cutset after O(c 6^k kn) steps with probability at least
1 - (1 - 1/(6^k))^c6^k, where c > 1 is a constant specified by the user, k is
the minimal size of a minimum weight loop cutset, and n is the number of
vertices. We also show empirically that a variant of this algorithm often finds
a loop cutset that is closer to the minimum weight loop cutset than the ones
found by the best deterministic algorithms known
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